Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature by Margaret Atwood
Published 1972 · 75,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature to read?
Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature scores 30 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 60 out of 100
- Accessible prose written for a general educated audience, not specialist academics.
- Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
- Abstraction: 70 out of 100
- The central argument about national symbols and victim positions operates at a high level of cultural generalization.
- Information density: 70 out of 100
- Covers a wide range of Canadian texts, each briefly analyzed in support of the central thesis.
- Narrative indirection: 20 out of 100
- Argument is stated bluntly and directly from the first pages.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- Survival as a national symbol is the book's central analytical object.
- Ironic distance: 40 out of 100
- Tone is earnest and polemical; irony appears mainly in Atwood's readings of the texts rather than her own rhetoric.
- Resolution withholding: 20 out of 100
- The thesis and its conclusions are stated with full clarity throughout.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- Organized thematically by Canadian literary preoccupations; the structure is clear and cumulative.
How Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature is regarded
Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature holds a literary regard score of 48 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.