Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History

Front Cover
Liverpool University Press, 2010 - History - 232 pages

In an era obsessed with celebrity and glamour, sophistication ranks among the most desirable of human qualities, but it was not always so. The word “sophistication” was once a negative term, meaning falsification, speciousness, perversion, or adulteration. Now, it positively glitters, carrying meanings of worldliness and refinement. Through a series of close readings of some of the essential texts of sophistication, Faye Hammill explores the developments in taste and ideology that account for this striking change. At the same time, Sophistication demonstrates that traces of older meanings linger—that hints of “sophistry” persist in even our most modern conceptions of the sophisticated.


Spanning more than two centuries of “sophistication,” this lively account features rereadings of canonical writers from the eighteenth century to the present, including Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Fanny Burney, Austen, James, Wharton, Fitzgerald, Nabokov, and Clyde Lampedusa. A complementary examination of lesser-known writers reveals that the development of modern sophistication is intimately connected with the evolution of middlebrow culture. From there, Hammill moves on to consider sophistication as expressed in contemporary magazines, films, and Web sites. Drawing on words and images from such diverse sources as Noël Coward, Vanity Fair, Sofia Coppola, and the New Yorker, Sophistication ultimately demonstrates that a preoccupation with—or a performance of—sophistication links unexpected works, disrupting the boundary between seriousness and frivolity.

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Contents

the emergence of modern sophistication
23
the postwar decades
164
65
180
Copyright

5 other sections not shown

Common terms and phrases

aesthetic Alice's American Angelica appears aristocratic Ashford Austen Beautiful and Damned beauty Beerbohm behaviour Bonjour Tristesse Cécile celebrity chapter characters chic Cold Comfort Farm complex context contrast cosmopolitanism Coward Crawford critics culture Daisy Ashford Daisy Miller dandy dandyism Dariaux Delysia discourse distinction dress Duke elite English Ethel Evelina Fanny Fanny Trollope fashion fiction film Flora French girl glamour Guide to Elegance Humbert imitation innocence Jane Austen Lady Lampedusa leisure literary Litvak living Lolita London Lord Orville magazine manners Mansfield Park meaning middle-class middlebrow Miss Pettigrew modern modernist moral narrative narrator Noël Noël Coward nostalgia novel pastoral play pleasure readers reading refinement remarks Romantic Sagan Salina Salteena scene self-conscious sentiment sexual smart social sophis sophistica story style suggests Tancredi taste texts tication tion Trollope twentieth century unsophisticated urban Vanity Fair Victorian vulgar Winesburg Winterbourne women word sophistication worldly writes Yorker Young Visiters Zuleika Dobson

About the author (2010)

Professor Faye Hammill is a Lecturer at the University of Strathclyde. Previous publications include 'Women, Celebrity and Literary Culture Between the Wars' (University of Texas Press, 2007) and 'Literary Culture and Female Authorship in Canada, 1760-2000' (Rodopi, 2003).

Bibliographic information

TitleSophistication: A Literary and Cultural History
AuthorFaye Hammill
Editionillustrated
PublisherLiverpool University Press, 2010
Original fromthe University of Michigan
DigitizedSep 16, 2011
ISBN1846312329, 9781846312328
Length232 pages
Subjects ›  › 

History / Social History
Literary Criticism / General
Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural & Social
Social Science / Popular Culture
  
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