Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body by Lee Horsley
Published 2005 · 79,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body to read?
Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body 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: 63 out of 100
- Feminist and cultural-studies vocabulary alongside readable critical prose.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Abstraction: 70 out of 100
- Theoretical claims about gender anchored in close readings of specific texts.
- Information density: 72 out of 100
- Broad coverage of authors and works within an organizing thematic argument.
- Narrative indirection: 14 out of 100
- Argument is developed directly with minimal rhetorical indirection.
- Symbolic density: 16 out of 100
- Analyzes symbolic meanings of bodies and spaces in crime fiction.
- Ironic distance: 14 out of 100
- Measured critical tone with occasional irony when analyzing gendered conventions.
- Resolution withholding: 100 out of 100
- Analytical conclusions are stated clearly.
- Structural complexity: 38 out of 100
- Chronological with thematic overlays and a sustained argument across chapters.
How Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body is regarded
Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body holds a literary regard score of 72 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.