The Western Canon by Harold Bloom
Published 1994 · 120,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Philosophy
How hard is The Western Canon to read?
The Western Canon scores 61 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
- Literary-critical vocabulary. Assumes wide reading.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- High-level aesthetic theory applied to specific authors.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Dense with literary references and close reading.
- Narrative indirection: 12 out of 100
- Author-by-author structure.
- Symbolic density: 22 out of 100
- The canon itself as a contested symbol.
- Ironic distance: 18 out of 100
- Polemical but deeply earnest about literature.
- Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
- His thesis is clear from the start.
- Structural complexity: 28 out of 100
- Twenty-six author chapters grouped by era.
How The Western Canon is regarded
The Western Canon holds a literary regard score of 55 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.