The Writing of the Australian Male by Robert Dixon
Published 1986 · 82,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is The Writing of the Australian Male to read?
The Writing of the Australian Male 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: 65 out of 100
- Postcolonial and cultural-theory vocabulary deployed throughout; more technical than general literary criticism.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Abstraction: 74 out of 100
- Theoretical claims about ideology, empire, and representation operate at a high level of abstraction throughout.
- Information density: 76 out of 100
- Dense with textual evidence from primary colonial sources and theoretical argument.
- Narrative indirection: 20 out of 100
- Reading against the grain is the book's method; argument proceeds by inversion and ironic juxtaposition.
- Symbolic density: 22 out of 100
- The landscape, the explorer, and the Indigenous absent are tracked as ideological symbols across multiple texts.
- Ironic distance: 24 out of 100
- Sustained ironic distance from the colonial texts under analysis is the governing rhetorical stance.
- Resolution withholding: 16 out of 100
- Diagnoses the ideological inheritance without offering a simple resolution.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- Organized thematically across the colonial period; each chapter builds the cumulative ideological argument.
How The Writing of the Australian Male is regarded
The Writing of the Australian Male 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.