Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction by Stephen Knight
Published 1980 · 72,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction to read?
Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction scores 62 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: 66 out of 100
- Marxist and structuralist critical vocabulary alongside otherwise accessible prose.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Abstraction: 74 out of 100
- Moves between abstract ideological claims and specific textual readings.
- Information density: 72 out of 100
- Dense theoretical apparatus applied to multiple primary texts.
- Narrative indirection: 16 out of 100
- Mostly direct polemical argument with occasional rhetorical indirection.
- Symbolic density: 18 out of 100
- Treats symbolic functions of plot devices as ideological symptoms.
- Ironic distance: 20 out of 100
- Critical irony directed at genre texts and their ideological work.
- Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
- Conclusions are delivered; ambiguity is noted where texts themselves resist resolution.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- Theoretical framework established first, then applied chapter by chapter to specific writers.
How Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction is regarded
Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction holds a literary regard score of 73 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.