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Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History

Online ISBN:
9781846316111
Print ISBN:
9781846312328
Publisher:
Liverpool University Press
Book

Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History

Published:
1 May 2010
Online ISBN:
9781846316111
Print ISBN:
9781846312328
Publisher:
Liverpool University Press

Abstract

In an era obsessed with celebrity and glamour, ‘sophistication’ has come to be perceived as the most desirable of human qualities, but it was not always so. This book explores how a word that once meant falsification and perversion came to be regarded as signifying discrimination and refinement. The author provides a literary, linguistic and cultural route from the Romantics, via the emergence of the Dandy and then of Modernism, to that most sophisticated of figures, Noël Coward, and on to the meaning of sophistication in the twenty–first century. Ranging widely across historical documents, magazines, adverts, films and novels, this book will be compulsory reading for sophisticates and scholars.

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