The Licensing Act of 1737 and the Staging of the Eighteenth-Century Essay by Margaret Anne Doody
Published 1996 · 180,000 words · about 15 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is The Licensing Act of 1737 and the Staging of the Eighteenth-Century Essay to read?
The Licensing Act of 1737 and the Staging of the Eighteenth-Century Essay scores 65 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
- Wide-ranging scholarly vocabulary with classical and literary historical terminology.
- Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
- Abstraction: 72 out of 100
- Large-scale theoretical claims about genre history supported by detailed textual argument.
- Information density: 78 out of 100
- Extraordinary range of evidence compressed into a sustained revisionist argument.
- Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
- Direct revisionist argument, though the scope creates some indirection.
- Symbolic density: 100 out of 100
- Analytical.
- Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
- Polemical edge to the revisionist project.
- Resolution withholding: 15 out of 100
- The scale of the argument means some threads remain open.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- Vast chronological and geographical range organized into a cumulative revisionist case.
How The Licensing Act of 1737 and the Staging of the Eighteenth-Century Essay is regarded
The Licensing Act of 1737 and the Staging of the Eighteenth-Century Essay 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.