The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development by Elizabeth Abel
Published 1983 · 366 pages · 85,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development to read?
The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development scores 66 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: 65 out of 100
- Feminist theoretical vocabulary from the early 1980s requires some contextual knowledge.
- Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
- Abstraction: 75 out of 100
- Operates simultaneously at the level of textual analysis and broad gender theory.
- Information density: 78 out of 100
- Multi-author collection covers a large body of primary texts with concentrated argument.
- Narrative indirection: 18 out of 100
- Some contributors use rhetorical indirection characteristic of feminist theory of the period.
- Symbolic density: 16 out of 100
- The 'voyage' metaphor organizes the collection symbolically without dominating individual essays.
- Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
- Several essays employ irony when exposing the male bias embedded in canonical genre definitions.
- Resolution withholding: 14 out of 100
- Collection form tolerates open ends; individual essays conclude firmly.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- Multi-author volume with an introduction that frames competing theoretical positions.
How The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development is regarded
The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development holds a literary regard score of 85 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.