The Literary History of the United States by Robert Spiller
Published 1948 · 2 pages · 250,000 words · about 21 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is The Literary History of the United States to read?
The Literary History of the United States scores 59 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: 52 out of 100
- Accessible scholarly prose aimed at a broad academic audience.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Abstraction: 60 out of 100
- Historical and contextual framing with some theoretical synthesis.
- Information density: 80 out of 100
- Encyclopedic; vast amounts of literary-historical information per page.
- Narrative indirection: 100 out of 100
- Direct survey and exposition throughout.
- Symbolic density: 80 out of 100
- Informational rather than interpretive register.
- Ironic distance: 80 out of 100
- Earnest scholarly endeavor with no ironic register.
- Resolution withholding: 100 out of 100
- Survey entries reach their conclusions; the work aims at comprehensiveness.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- Multi-author, multi-volume structure organized chronologically by period.
How The Literary History of the United States is regarded
The Literary History of the United States holds a literary regard score of 65 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.