Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History
Faye Hammill
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 Ranging widely across historical documents, ma ... More
Keywords: celebrity, glamour, sophistication, discrimination, Romantics, Dandies, Modernism, Noël Coward, falsification, perversion
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2010 | Print ISBN-13: 9781846312328 |
| Published to Liverpool Scholarship Online: June 2013 | DOI:10.5949/UPO9781846316111 |
