The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman by F.O. Matthiessen
Published 1941 · 180,000 words · about 15 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman to read?
The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman scores 57 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. 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: 62 out of 100
- Rich critical vocabulary combining aesthetic and democratic-political discourse.
- Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
- Abstraction: 72 out of 100
- Engages philosophical, aesthetic, and democratic-theoretical levels simultaneously.
- Information density: 76 out of 100
- Exhaustive in close reading and historical context.
- Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
- Direct argument, though Matthiessen circles back to his themes repeatedly.
- Symbolic density: 18 out of 100
- Matthiessen's own prose is charged with democratic-symbolic values.
- Ironic distance: 12 out of 100
- Earnest and committed critical voice.
- Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
- Builds to a clear account of the period's literary achievement.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- Organized by author and formal concerns within a unified historical argument.
How The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman is regarded
The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman holds a literary regard score of 80 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.