The Historical Novel by György Lukács
Published 1937 · 364 pages · 90,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is The Historical Novel to read?
The Historical Novel scores 71 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. 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: 68 out of 100
- Marxist philosophical vocabulary — historical materialism, bourgeois ideology, totality — requires familiarity with the tradition.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Abstraction: 78 out of 100
- Highly abstract theoretical claims about history, class, and artistic truth applied to specific novels and authors.
- Information density: 78 out of 100
- Dense with historical, theoretical, and literary claims; each section advances multiple simultaneous arguments.
- Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
- Proceeds dialectically rather than linearly, but the argument is explicit and the conclusions stated.
- Symbolic density: 12 out of 100
- Analytical prose focused on historical and social meaning rather than symbolic density.
- Ironic distance: 100 out of 100
- Earnest Marxist conviction; irony is not Lukács's mode.
- Resolution withholding: 100 out of 100
- Lukács advances clear theses about what the historical novel is, what it achieves, and how it declines.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- Three major sections — Scott and the genesis of the form, the classical period, and the decline — each with complex internal argument.
How The Historical Novel is regarded
The Historical Novel 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.