Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History by Faye Hammill (English) Hardco

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Sophistication

by Faye Hammill

Hammill 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, Noel Coward, and on to the meaning of sophistication in the twenty-first century.

FORMAT Hardcover LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New

Publisher Description

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. In this fascinating book Faye Hammill explores how a word that once meant falsification and perversion came to be regarded as signifying discrimination and refinement. Hammill 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of figures, Noel Coward, and on to the meaning of sophistication in the twenty-first century.Ranging widely across historical documents, magazines, adverts, films and novels, this path-breaking book will be compulsory reading for sophisticates and scholars.

Author Biography

Faye Hammill is Professor of English at the University of Strathclyde and the author of 'Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History' (Liverpool University Press, 2010).

Table of Contents

  • List of illustrations
  • Acknowledgements
  • Introduction: Reading sophistication
  • 1. Scandal, sentiment and shepherdesses: the emergence of modern sophistication
  • 2. Childhood, consumption and decadence: Victorian and Edwardian sophistication
  • 3. Melancholy, modernity and the middlebrow: the twenties and thirties
  • 4. Nostalgia, glamour and excess: the postwar decades
  • Conclusion: 'The problem of leisure': millennial sophistication
  • Bibliography
  • Index

Review

Original in focus, critically nuanced and written with humour and elan, Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History is smart, subtle and intelligent; much like its subject. Hammill's highly original work has impressive breadth - roughly from 18th century to the present - and covers an remarkable number of the essential literary texts on the topic from Sheridan and Jane Austen to Sophia Coppola. Looking at the period between 1860 and 1960, Hammill (English, Univ. of Strathclyde, UK) studies the cultural meaning of "sophistication." She points out that in 19th-century literature, sophistication was linked to sophistry and "disingenuous reasoning." Fanny Burney's Evelina illustrates the contrast between artlessness--rustic, pastoral qualities--and urban vices (pretension, falsity). In Mansfield Park, Jane Austen observed how sophistication, primarily embodied by Henry Crawford, was being introduced and contested in rural as well as urban environments. In looking at Victorian and Edwardian interpretations of sophistication, the author examines Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson, and Henry James's Daisy Miller. The early 20th century celebrated sophistication as a form of modernity inextricably connected to glamour (as in Noel Coward's plays). By way of illustration, Hammill reads Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned, Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm, and Winifred Watson's Miss Pettigrew Livesfor a Day. Sophistication turned melancholic and nostalgic in postwar fiction, as the author demonstrates in readings of Franeoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard. A book for those interested in how cultural values and therefore human behavior change over time. A book for those interested in how cultural values and therefore human behavior change over time. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students and above. 'Sophistication' eludes definition, and yet provocatively invites us to pursue, capture and possess it." So Faye Hammill begins her fascinating and engaging study of the je ne sais quoi of sophistication in literature and culture from the 18th century to the present day. By general cultural consensus, sophistication seems to be something one possesses rather than learns; to need to ask how one becomes sophisticated is to necessarily exclude oneself from ever being so. Yet, as Hammill demonstrates, almost without exception the literature of sophistication of the past three centuries has been preoccupied, more or less overtly, with providing an education in sophistication, at the same time as presenting it as the reserve of a discriminating elite. An important aspect of Hammill's exploration of sophistication is the changing meaning of the word from its etymological origins in ancient Greece to the present day, and the traces of earlier connotations still to be found in its ambiguous modern usage. Derived from the Ancient Greek for "wisdom", sophia, but also the Greek sophist philosophers, with their emphasis on the power of persuasive rhetoric over logical argument, sophistication was for a long time a negative quality, suggestive of falsity or deception. Up until the end of the 19th century, we learn, for example, that the English-speaking world was deeply suspicious of the attitude of sophistication, as evidenced in the derogatory terms by which it was described; frivolous, insincere, perverse and, perhaps most typically damning, French. For English commentators in the 1790s, sophistication was a marker of French decadence in contrast to the more solid values of English moral virtue. It is ironic, then, that it was the English phenomenon of the dandy, the elegant self-made man epitomised by the Regency arbiter of understated sartorial style Beau Brummell, that would contribute most to the modern understanding of "sophistication" as signifying taste and refinement. Fleeing the country to escape gambling debts in 1816, Brummell died penniless in an insane asylum in France, but his influence continued on both sides of the Channel, to be developed in a more metaphorical sense by the poet Charles Baudelaire, who described the dandy as having "no profession other than elegance", his refinement defined by "the aristocratic superiority of his mind". Hammill's analysis covers an impressive historical and literary breadth, paying attention to canonical literary texts - from the late 18th-century satire of Richard Sheridan's The School for Scandal, to Henry James' novel of fatal sophistication Daisy Miller, and Noel Coward's uber-stylish Private Lives - while enthusiastically reviving those that were once popular but are now relatively obscure, such as Max Beerbohm's parody of dandyism, Zuleika Dobson, and Winifred Watson's comedy of sophisticated transformation, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, and offering original readings of others, such as the interplay of innocence and sophistication in Lewis Carroll's Alice tales or Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. It is, however, the account of the Jazz Age world of the new American glossy magazines such as Vanity Fair, The Smart Set, The New Yorker and Esquire, and the evolution of a New York literary and cultural sophistication in the early decades of the 20th century that is perhaps most implicitly provocative. For what Hammill's book reveals, although does not explicitly address, is that it is a certain tradition within American life that ultimately perhaps best understood and inherited the quality of sophistication and savoir faire in the 20th century. James dedicated almost his entire oeuvre to dramatising the clash of American innocence and European sophistication, but the New World pursued its transatlantic education quickly and well; from the sharp wit and mannered urbanity of Dorothy Parker, to the lustre of Jay Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's archetype of the American dream's self-made man, and the hard-drinking ennui of Lady Brett Ashley, Ernest Hemingway's heroine in The Sun Also Rises, the icons of modern sophistication are American creations. It is the same tradition of American sophistication that reappears in the cool grace and elusive detachment of John F. Kennedy as seen through the eyes of Norman Mailer, burnished with what Mailer famously described as the "patina of that other life, the second American life, the long electric night with the fires of neon leading down the highway to the murmur of jazz". Every reader will think of other figures who for them epitomise sophistication, and it is a marker of the energy of Hammill's study that it stimulates us to do so. Original in focus, critically nuanced and written with humour and elan, Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History is smart, subtle and intelligent; much like its subject. "'How deep, how perfect, the effect made here by refusal to make any effect whatsoever!' thought the Duke." -Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson, in reference to Oxford1 If any field is more in need of sophistication and glamour than academia, I cannot think of it. Even the taxidermists are better dressed. In such a spirit did I approach the two books under review, and I come before you to recommend them each highly. Hammill's is smart and capacious, and Brown's is witty and evocative. They can be worn separately or together. When I'm in need of capricious whimsy I turn to Brown, but when I want to fold my six-foot-tall Nordic-Brazilian frame into the original Eames chair in my study of the whatever the German is for pied-a-terre in the section of Berlin I'm not going to name because then you would show up and ruin it for the rest of us; cross my mile-high legs, casually dangling a Valentino andal from one of those glittery red straps as I unconsciously tuck my hair behind one shell-like ear and bite my lower lip, a habit I've been told just gnaws off some of my heedlessly yet perfectly applied Viktor & Rolf lipstick2 and makes me all the more fetching-that is, when I'm just staying home-I'm going for the Hamill. Vogue would at this point tell you where I procured the books, but I really should try to keep something to myself. Mystery and all that. Besides, they were free for me-gratis is so sad-making a word-and you'll probably have to pay for them. Modernism has a particular hold on the topics of sophistication and glamour, if only because each peak in the 1920s or 1930s. The historical point of emergence differs depending where you look: Stephen Gundle tracks glamour as originating in Romanticism and the rise of the bourgeois in the eighteenth century, distinguishing glamour from monarchical and courtly magnificence with its firm grip on privilege,3 while Carol Dyhouse tracks it as taking shape in 1900, with Walter Scott's use of the term in the 1830s less useful than the prominence glamour took in the 1930s through the 1950s with the rise of the Hollywood star system.4 In the books under consideration, Judith Brown gestures toward the possibility of unearthing glamour in "medieval romance, ... eighteenth-century drama, ... Romantic poetry, ... [and] the fin de siecle,"5 but she too puts her bets on the modern period as its peak; and even as Faye Hammill begins in the eighteenth century, she also takes the early- to mid-twentieth century as sophistication's zenith. It may be more useful to think of sophistication and glamour as a constellation of terms, encompassing the civilized, snobbism, chic, irony and satire, camp, and cosmopolitanism, with the sophisticate in possession of its three most important characteristics: worldliness, taste, and distinction; and the glamorous in possession of beauty, something of the sublime, sexuality, and radiance. Sophistication, as Hamill reminds us, springs from "sophos" and its particular brand of wisdom, hence "sophistry" and "philosophers"; the former term, with its slitheriness, would go on to inflect sophistication with what Hammill refers to as a an "anxiety," one which it is in some sense her book's central mission to dispel.6 Glamour, as Brown reminds us, "first referred to a state of learning as well as to the inexplicable effects of magic" (G, 10), recalling the fact that (she quotes from New Fowler's Modern English) "etymologically [it] was an alteration of the word grammar with the sense ('occult, learning, magic, necromancy') of the old word gramarye." (G, 9-10). Thus glamour's origin is both Scottish (given Scott) and spooky, and both sophistication and glamour derive from a certain kind of knowing or information-dispensing. Etymology aside, it may be that to delineate the terms over-neatly is to kill them, for a certain je ne sais quoi is vital to each. Both Brown and Hammill deal with this problem, albeit in different methodological ways: Hammill gives us a history, so the sophistication is defined by its contexts; while Brown delineates a smart-one might say sophisticated-account of form, plastic enough to vary with occasion. As modern concepts, glamour and sophistication go manicured hand in expensive glove, but they are distinct. The points of difference are in some dispute, but this combination of books allow us to draw several distinctions. In reading the two books together I have come to believe that even with their shared roots in performativity and peculiar forms of wisdom, sophistication is about knowing things and glamour is about doing things, even if those forms of knowing and doing arise in paradoxical ways. Some aspects of sophistication that Hammill outlines are: an adaptability to environment (S, 59), even as one remains distinct from it (allowing sophistication's "consistency" [S, 76]); a recurrent emphasis on leisure that springs from "the sophisticate's complex identification with, and repudiation of aristocratic privilege" (S, 16); and an "artificial style and the transgression of gender boundaries." (S, 116). Hammill "focus[es] primarily on class and secondarily on gender" (S, 127), and is aware that "it would have been equally interesting to explore the impact of sophistication on constructions of homosexuality in twentieth-century writing or on constructions of race in the literature of the Harlem Renaissance," as well as visual iconography, particularly around the Hollywood system (S, 127-28). These are limits, but not in the sense of limitations, and the other books I have mentioned do this. Hammill's survey is both ample and open-handed. Her texts are primarily literary, and with two exceptions English language in origin. She is at her best on British texts, which comprise the majority of the survey; as pleasing as it was to have Winesburg, Ohio's story "Sophistication" appear, and however obligatory Edith Wharton in such an account, The Beautiful and the Damned and Fitzgerald generally do not emerge satisfyingly. (Henry James and Eliot are non-American enough to qualify as not non-British.) She moves primarily by close reading, with the attendant liability that the accounts of sophistication, even as they are historicized, emerge primarily through individual instances, and she tends to reply overly on Joseph Litvak's (fine) Strange Gourmets for theoretical buttressing. The three richest tenets underlying Hammill's study are her contention that "it is in the realm of the middlebrow that sophistication is most insistently invoked and explored in early twentieth-century culture" (S, 119); her association of sophistication with nostalgia and the pastoral; and the question of whether sophistication can be learned or is innate. The latter leads to Hammill's recurrent interest in the role of the child in regard to the sophisticate, whether taking the metaphorical form of the innocent (she begins with the 1778 novel Evelina), or in literal form, as with the nine-year old novelist Daisy Ashford, author of The Young Visiters (published 1919) and other misspelled classics, a creature new to me and whom I immediately proceeded to dislike. While the issue of sophistication and the child is an important one, leading as it does to the question of education, her "Childhood, Consumption, and Decadence" chapter is one of the more vertiginous-Alice in Wonderland doesn't strike me as sophisticated, just knowing; and Alice herself always struck me as a bit of a stick in the mud: intrepid, but more interesting contextually than inherently. Hammill is at her best in the blooming field of the middlebrow: her account of Stella Gibbons's 1932 Cold Comfort Farm draws together pastoral conventions (both satirized and straight) with the question of education and sophistication; and the explanation of Winifred Watson's Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (1938) is strong and revitalizing, "unusual in exploring [sophistication] in the context of relationship and warmth" (S, 127). Her account of Vanity Fair as a magazine for aspirants is mandatory reading, and presses for more nuance in the lexicon we currently have for mass-market and "little magazines." Even as it is explanatory, Brown's Glamour in Six Dimensions is evocative. This is not critical finessing, for while Hammill may be concerned primarily with social class, Brown's terrain is the sensory; in one such instance, "portals" serve as a piquant binding mechanism between perfume and Wallace Stevens, and the word gets to how glamour invokes such liminal states. Brown's wonderful account of the cigarette and of Chanel No. 5 is indicative of her summoning of the aesthetics of radiance, one which exceeds mere marketing. In the case of the cigarette, "[h]ere is glamour: an experience that moves one out of the material world of demands, responsibilities, and attention to productivity, and into the another, more ethereally bound, fleeting, beautiful, and deadly." (G, 5) Brown is dead-on with "deadly," and not in the hygienic sense now incorporated into nicotine marketing, with the cruel fortune-cookie messages adorning cigarette packs one buys in France ("Fumer tue"). For Brown, "Glamour, like the act of smoking, thus transcends any simple structure of the commodity, rising into the realm of formal aesthetics, modern philosophies of space and time, the shifting lines of identity, and the dazzling effects of the surface." (G, 5) Brown's central argument is that "Glamour ... coalesces in the modern period as a negative aesthetic ... Glamour is cold, indifferent, and deathly; it relies on abstraction, on the thing translated into idea and therefore the loss of the thing itself, curling away from earthly concerns as if in a whiff of smoke." (G, 5). She argues that "glamour during the period inheres in the very problem of modernist form" (G, 8). This claim is compelling, but it remains in need of more concerted (formal) explanation. Is this form in the sense that Michael Fried means when he's beholding a Frank Stella painting,7 or form as the final semantic grip exerted by grammar or genre? My sense is that it's more the former, but when Brown refers to "the form of a poem" (G, 16), how Stevens's "The Snow Man" freezes us out with "multiple forms of nothing" (G, 35), or how a "transmuted thing [rests] no longer in the form of an object" (G, 23), I become confused. I remain unclear for instance as to why "the pose, of course, is the essence of form": that it is "assumed or predetermined by the subject and held to achieve a desired effect" (G, 90) suggests that form involves an essential stillness, and exceeds the mortal or worldly. These are philosophical questions, and they radiate around an account of visual phenomenology. There is an affinity between Brown and Fried, both captivated by aspects of flatness and surface, even as they note the ways that what Fried famously called literalness are "neutralized" in Fried's term8 and "press[ed] into" "another dimension" in Brown's (G, 9). Brown is open about her realm as the textual, so it may be unfair to ask for a delineation of form in the terms that an art historian might want-but, no: I am being overly kind and under-ly demanding of a critic who deserves serious reckoning. The sensory realm Brown most frequently engages is that of the visual, from the "close-up" of a movie star's face to advertisements, and the occasional illustrations in her book whet one's optic appetites. By the close of this book, you know as you have never before that surface is not always a metaphor, and that, scent notwithstanding, the visual register is where glamour exerts its most ferocious grip. But this does not answer my question. Brown's account of form clearly takes aesthetics as paramount, with glamour produced "in the space between subject and object" (G, 9). Form emerges for Brown as the instantiation (too clotted a word for her dexterous rendering of the ethereal) of an alienation effect, so when for instance one "behold[s] an image in close-up," "details emerge that would otherwise go unnoticed, creating new and spectacular forms of previously unfamiliar objects" (G, 104). This is a modernist truism, making strange the everyday, but what I take to be Brown's account of form is one which imbues it with new life, however frozen its incarnation. "New life" is inadequate; negative life may be closer. The answer may lie in her reference to "negative aesthetics" as "form without form" (G, 42). Most interestingly, Brown sees glamour as a shift from aestheticism, which "exists outside a framework of good and evil, satisfying itself" with "selfishness as its key to pleasure" (G, 7), to aesthetics, with glamour's "move away from insistent subjectivity to the impersonal style that modernists promoted and that would ... resist the subject altogether." (G, 7) The status of the negative is key in Brown'll probably have to pay for them. Modernism has a particular hold on the topics of sophistication and glamour, if only because each peak in the 1920s or 1930s. The historical point of emergence differs depending where you look: Stephen Gundle tracks glamour as originating in Romanticism and the rise of the bourgeois in the eighteenth century, distinguishing glamour from monarchical and courtly magnificence with its firm grip on privilege,3 while Carol Dyhouse tracks it as taking shape in 1900, with Walter Scott's use of the term in the 1830s less useful than the prominence glamour took in the 1930s through the 1950s with the rise of the Hollywood star system.4 In the books under consideration, Judith Brown gestures toward the possibility of unearthing glamour in "medieval romance, ... eighteenth-century drama, ... Romantic poetry, ... [and] the fin de siecle,"5 but she too puts her bets on the modern period as its peak; and even as Faye Hammill begins in the eighteenth century, she also takes the early- to mid-twentieth century as sophistication's zenith. It may be more useful to think of sophistication and glamour as a constellation of terms, encompassing the civilized, snobbism, chic, irony and satire, camp, and cosmopolitanism, with the sophisticate in possession of its three most important characteristics: worldliness, taste, and distinction; and the glamorous in possession of beauty, something of the sublime, sexuality, and radiance. Sophistication, as Hamill reminds us, springs from "sophos" and its particular brand of wisdom, hence "sophistry" and "philosophers"; the former term, with its slitheriness, would go on to inflect sophistication with what Hammill refers to as a an "anxiety," one which it is in some sense her book's central mission to dispel.6 Glamour, as Brown reminds us, "first referred to a state of learning as well as to the inexplicable effects of magic" (G, 10), recalling the fact that (she quotes from New Fowler's Modern English) "etymologically [it] was an alteration of the word grammar with the sense ('occult, learning, magic, necromancy') of the old word gramarye." (G, 9-10). Thus glamour's origin is both Scottish (given Scott) and spooky, and both sophistication and glamour derive from a certain kind of knowing or information-dispensing. Etymology aside, it may be that to delineate the terms over-neatly is to kill them, for a certain je ne sais quoi is vital to each. Both Brown and Hammill deal with this problem, albeit in different methodological ways: Hammill gives us a history, so the sophistication is defined by its contexts; while Brown delineates a smart-one might say sophisticated-account of form, plastic enough to vary with occasion. As modern concepts, glamour and sophistication go manicured hand in expensive glove, but they are distinct. The points of difference are in some dispute, but this combination of books allow us to draw several distinctions. In reading the two books together I have come to believe that even with their shared roots in performativity and peculiar forms of wisdom, sophistication is about knowing things and glamour is about doing things, even if those forms of knowing and doing arise in paradoxical ways. Some aspects of sophistication that Hammill outlines are: an adaptability to environment (S, 59), even as one remains distinct from it (allowing sophistication's "consistency" [S, 76]); a recurrent emphasis on leisure that springs from "the sophisticate's complex identification with, and repudiation of aristocratic privilege" (S, 16); and an "artificial style and the transgression of gender boundaries." (S, 116). Hammill "focus[es] primarily on class and secondarily on gender" (S, 127), and is aware that "it would have been equally interesting to explore the impact of sophistication on constructions of homosexuality in twentieth-century writing or on constructions of race in the literature of the Harlem Renaissance," as well as visual iconography, particularly around the Hollywood system (S, 127-28). These are limits, but not in the sense of limitations, and the other books I have mentioned do this. Hammill's survey is both ample and open-handed. Her texts are primarily literary, and with two exceptions English language in origin. She is at her best on British texts, which comprise the majority of the survey; as pleasing as it was to have Winesburg, Ohio's story "Sophistication" appear, and however obligatory Edith Wharton in such an account, The Beautiful and the Damned and Fitzgerald generally do not emerge satisfyingly. (Henry James and Eliot are non-American enough to qualify as not non-British.) She moves primarily by close reading, with the attendant liability that the accounts of sophistication, even as they are historicized, emerge primarily through individual instances, and she tends to reply overly on Joseph Litvak's (fine) Strange Gourmets for theoretical buttressing. The three richest tenets underlying Hammill's study are her contention that "it is in the realm of the middlebrow that sophistication is most insistently invoked and explored in early twentieth-century culture" (S, 119); her association of sophistication with nostalgia and the pastoral; and the question of whether sophistication can be learned or is innate. The latter leads to Hammill's recurrent interest in the role of the child in regard to the sophisticate, whether taking the metaphorical form of the innocent (she begins with the 1778 novel Evelina), or in literal form, as with the nine-year old novelist Daisy Ashford, author of The Young Visiters (published 1919) and other misspelled classics, a creature new to me and whom I immediately proceeded to dislike. While the issue of sophistication and the child is an important one, leading as it does to the question of education, her "Childhood, Consumption, and Decadence" chapter is one of the more vertiginous-Alice in Wonderland doesn't strike me as sophisticated, just knowing; and Alice herself always struck me as a bit of a stick in the mud: intrepid, but more interesting contextually than inherently. Hammill is at her best in the blooming field of the middlebrow: her account of Stella Gibbons's 1932 Cold Comfort Farm draws together pastoral conventions (both satirized and straight) with the question of education and sophistication; and the explanation of Winifred Watson's Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (1938) is strong and revitalizing, "unusual in exploring [sophistication] in the context of relationship and warmth" (S, 127). Her account of Vanity Fair as a magazine for aspirants is mandatory reading, and presses for more nuance in the lexicon we currently have for mass-market and "little magazines." Even as it is explanatory, Brown's Glamour in Six Dimensions is evocative. This is not critical finessing, for while Hammill may be concerned primarily with social class, Brown's terrain is the sensory; in one such instance, "portals" serve as a piquant binding mechanism between perfume and Wallace Stevens, and the word gets to how glamour invokes such liminal states. Brown's wonderful account of the cigarette and of Chanel No. 5 is indicative of her summoning of the aesthetics of radiance, one which exceeds mere marketing. In the case of the cigarette, "[h]ere is glamour: an experience that moves one out of the material world of demands, responsibilities, and attention to productivity, and into the another, more ethereally bound, fleeting, beautiful, and deadly." (G, 5) Brown is dead-on with "deadly," and not in the hygienic sense now incorporated into nicotine marketing, with the cruel fortune-cookie messages adorning cigarette packs one buys in France ("Fumer tue"). For Brown, "Glamour, like the act of smoking, thus transcends any simple structure of the commodity, rising into the realm of formal aesthetics, modern philosophies of space and time, the shifting lines of identity, and the dazzling effects of the surface." (G, 5) Brown's central argument is that "Glamour ... coalesces in the modern period as a negative aesthetic ... Glamour is cold, indifferent, and deathly; it relies on abstraction, on the thing translated into idea and therefore the loss of the thing itself, curling away from earthly concerns as if in a whiff of smoke." (G, 5). She argues that "glamour during the period inheres in the very problem of modernist form" (G, 8). This claim is compelling, but it remains in need of more concerted (formal) explanation. Is this form in the sense that Michael Fried means when he's beholding a Frank Stella painting,7 or form as the final semantic grip exerted by grammar or genre? My sense is that it's more the former, but when Brown refers to "the form of a poem" (G, 16), how Stevens's "The Snow Man" freezes us out with "multiple forms of nothing" (G, 35), or how a "transmuted thing [rests] no longer in the form of an object" (G, 23), I become confused. I remain unclear for instance as to why "the pose, of course, is the essence of form": that it is "assumed or predetermined by the subject and held to achieve a desired effect" (G, 90) suggests that form involves an essential stillness, and exceeds the mortal or worldly. These are philosophical questions, and they radiate around an account of visual phenomenology. There is an affinity between Brown and Fried, both captivated by aspects of flatness and surface, even as they note the ways that what Fried famously called literalness are "neutralized" in Fried's term8 and "press[ed] into" "another dimension" in Brown's (G, 9). Brown is open about her realm as the textual, so it may be unfair to ask for a delineation of form in the terms that an art historian might want-but, no: I am being overly kind and under-ly demanding of a critic who deserves serious reckoning. The sensory realm Brown most frequently engages is that of the visual, from the "close-up" of a movie star's face to advertisements, and the occasional illustrations in her book whet one's optic appetites. By the close of this book, you know as you have never before that surface is not always a metaphor, and that, scent notwithstanding, the visual register is where glamour exerts its most ferocious grip. But this does not answer my question. Brown's account of form clearly takes aesthetics as paramount, with glamour produced "in the space between subject and object" (G, 9). Form emerges for Brown as the instantiation (too clotted a word for her dexterous rendering of the ethereal) of an alienation effect, so when for instance one "behold[s] an image in close-up," "details emerge that would otherwise go unnoticed, creating new and spectacular forms of previously unfamiliar objects" (G, 104). This is a modernist truism, making strange the everyday, but what I take to be Brown's account of form is one which imbues it with new life, however frozen its incarnation. "New life" is inadequate; negative life may be closer. The answer may lie in her reference to "negative aesthetics" as "form without form" (G, 42). Most interestingly, Brown sees glamour as a shift from aestheticism, which "exists outside a framework of good and evil, satisfying itself" with "selfishness as its key to pleasure" (G, 7), to aesthetics, with glamour's "move away from insistent subjectivity to the impersonal style that modernists promoted and that would ... resist the subject altogether." (G, 7) The status of the negative is key in Brown's formulation, and accordingly she wrests the "inhuman" from glamour with verve and often brilliance, in both its optic and mental senses. The six dimensions of her title refer to the book's six chapters. That said, its chapter titles suggest a capaciousness not always borne out by their contents: "Perception" is wholly satisfying, for whom else would have thought to pair Chanel's No. 5 with Stevens? However, "Violence" (on The Great Gatsby and a Katherine Mansfield story); and "Photography" (on Woolf, mostly Mrs. Dalloway, and a brief analogical pass at one of Eadweard Muybridge's still-frame photographic sequences: see whetted optic appetites above) seemed truncated; and "Primitivism," with its reliance on a reading of Wallace Thurman's Infants of the Spring and Nella Larsen's much analyzed Quicksand, alongside Fanon, adds little to the ongoing conversations on race and modernism. Framed as the chapter is by a too-brief account of Josephine Baker, the chapter raises more questions concerning racialized images of gender than are here answered. But enough with the nay-saying. Brown's two strongest chapters are "Celebrity" and the one that closes the book, "Cellophane" (which ran in these pages). The former concerns itself primarily with Greta Garbo, and given the star's performance of indifferent somnambulism, Brown convincingly argues for Garbo as "enact[ing] on screen one of literary modernism's central principles, the extinction of personality" (G, 117). Brown does wonderful things from which modernists with an eye to the screen will benefit, for her account is expansive. She takes "celebrity" as a "negative space, a space that absorbs but does not produce meaning" (G, 103)-or rather it produces a meaning that repels comprehension, and this is the heart of the negative aesthetic that Brown traces. "Cellophane" is at once a jeu d'esprit and a triumph, tracking the plastics du jour and their relation to Gertrude Stein and the opera Fours Saints in Three Acts-or what Stein took as her opera despite its composer Virgil Thomson.9 (The fact that Stein was fine with taking her collaborator less seriously seems to have extended to the critic, for Thomson is referred to as Thompson throughout Brown's book; on the other hand, following a reference to Stein's set of stories called Three Lives, Four Saints is slimmed down to Three Saints-or maybe Three Lives is plumped up to Four Saints [G, 136]; I wasn't quite sure, but it evens things out a bit.) Brown stages the 1934 performance of Four Saints, with its cellophane-draped stage by Florine Stettheimer, as a take-off point for an investigation of celluloid, thermoplastics, and Bakelite-with "the new technologies" of glamour colluding with the exclusions and anxieties inherent in the "racial dividing line" that emerged around having African-Americans perform front and center (G, 158). Stettheimer's idea of, as another critic paraphrased it, "painting the cast white or silver" (G, 156) fortunately did not occur. I leave it to the reader to buy Brown's book in order to savor the 1968 cellophane dress with which it closes. Brown and Hammill are thus interested in different ends of materialism: Brown with how certain aspects of glamour appear as a triumph of sheen over commodity fetishism; and Hammill with the performative means by which sophistication is an enactment of social class. Brown's call to arms is compelling and indicative of her strength as a writer: "Glamour and commodity-yes, but not only, and not necessarily." (G, 13) The possession of (or by) a critical voice and sensibility is rare in academia, and it is worth contemplating not just what sophistication or glamour might have to offer modernists, but criticism generally. Adam Phillips has remarked upon gratitude as a propensity and topic for Christopher Ricks-the idea that a critic may be impelled so as to take being grateful as their task; that this is both a form of liberty and of bondage-and there is something of this in Hammill's critical mission.10 Hammill is an essentially generous critic; she extends to us the pleasure she has herself found in the material. I was slightly startled to have the request so bluntly put (S, 18), as if there were something I expected of criticism on sophistication to entail, and that that something was either not being met, or being met in a way I had not expected and could not, slightly, bear. To go back half a pace: I was not aware I had expectations about what a critic of sophistication would sound like, just as I do not have expectations about what a critic of Compton-Burnett or movies might sound like. This may say more about me as a reader than Hammill as a writer, but I do not mean that to be the case, for in bringing to sophistication a smart and entirely lucid style that holds nothing back, and says nothing that it does not entirely mean, Hammill hits on the ethical underpinnings of marrying sophistication to criticism as a venture in itself. Further, Hammill's approach takes the connection between being a critic of sophistication to sophistication itself-places I do not think that T. S. Eliot would, in his demands of the critic, venture, and which seem to me at times entirely original. It is important to understand that there is something remarkable in having a generous spirit extend sophistication toward one, for the gesture's quality brings out the fact that there is something essentially philosophically selfish at work in sophistication. That is, a critic who writes generously about sophistication, hoping that others will take from the work a variety of the pleasure she has found, may appear at odds with the spirit of sophistication qua enterprise. Sophistication may be a gift, but it is not a gift one gives others. Here I clearly differ (even amid my lauding) from Hammill, who sees "the amoral, self-obsessed form which belongs to characters such as [Choderlos Laclos's 1782 Les Liaisons Dangereuses's] the Marquise de Merteuil or Lord Illingworth in Wilde's A Woman of No Importance" as "more unusual forms of sophistication" (S, 175). My use of "selfish" might be better served by an invocation of philosophical skepticism; couples may enjoy each other but do so in separate and occasionally annihilating ways. The cover of Hammill's book features Gertrude Lawrence and Noel Coward, he at the keyboard and she at the cigarette (with ebony cigarette holder, duh), but the two sit back-to-back, not cheek to cheek. To take this as a statement about sexual predilections and mutual incompatibility is partly right, but sex goes only so far as an explanation (further, as an endeavor); better is to recognize this as a posture of mutual skepticism, as if the other (even one's favorite other) were not and could not be entirely registered, even as one may lean on that other for support. The single photograph included in Hammill's book is of the same couple, this time face-to-face in a 1930 still from Private Lives: here they stare at each other, but just as Coward's play's title tells us something about the basis of sophisticated coupledom, the image of this vis-a-vis is of the two staring blankly into each other's eyes, pleasure having come to a pause. Unlike Hammill, I do not read this as "the character's complete absorption in one another" (S, 114). They don't even look like they're enjoying their cigarettes. Far more pleasurable, for us and for them, is the cover's rendering of the relationship, with its sophisticated, skeptical recognition of mutual privacy. I am not saying that the sophisticated couple is an oxymoron-anyone who watches The Thin Man movies could not possibly. I am saying that Nick and Nora know that the world begins and ends with the proposition of Nick or Nora, and to have found each other, in this world of guns and unctuous sentiment ("The next person who says 'Merry Christmas' to me, I'll kill 'em," reports Nora) is unbearably lucky, and there is every chance that the other might vanish at any minute, and perhaps was never quite all there in the first place. It is not for nothing that Nora, upon discovering (again) her husband in a bar, inquires as to how many martinis he's had (six) and studiously places the same order: in bulk, pointing with her beautifully gloved hand, one by one, to where each martini shall be placed before her. She will match him drink for drink. But there is all the difference, and our sense that she is unlikely to remember the particulars the following day is borne out by the next scene's revealing her prostrate in bed asking what hit her. She is more certain about where the martinis will appear than she is about the possibility of sharing the world in which her husband-before her as she places her drinks order-occupies. The two are from different worlds: he was a detective before meeting her, likes wrestling matches (does not wear "screwy" hats to them), and knows men named Face, Meatballs, and Spider (Spider Webb); she is from money. They enjoy addressing each other as "Mr. Charles" and "Mrs. Charles" both because it is a social convention and because they are playing at adopting it: we al play at adopting social conventions (conventions are fundamentally theatrical, a fact one needs both to recall and forget at MLA), but the sophisticated couple is also playing very seriously, acknowledging the unlikely and vertiginous fact of the marriage to begin with. Otherness begins with the recognition that one's interlocutor is deeply different from one's self. At one point Nora throws her arms around her husband and says, "Oh, Nicky, I love you. Because you know such lovely people." She is not referring to herself,11 and that's class, bub. If Hammill is a generous critic, Brown is a dazzling one. These are different forms (and here I mean form in the sense of ways of being in the world) of critical intelligence. I do not imply a hierarchy. Brown excels at the glancing blow (she refers once to Barthes's punctum in her account of visual experience), and she is often enthralling. Hammill is deeply invested in the sharing of pleasure-and so she serves as a rebuke to my sense that sophistication is not a gift one gives others. I remain obdurate in my assessment that the fantasy of sophistication ultimately relies upon its innate quality, rather than a tutelary one, but each critic has taught me something about skepticism's limits (if not cure). Both Hammill and Brown are aware of the narcissisms attending their topics, even as they seek in their different ways to delimit them: Hammill as I have described; and even as Brown glosses convincingly the fact that "the fascinated gaze can only look back at itself," she holds out some hope for "the pleasure of glitter offer[ing] some compensation ... for the thing we cannot have (G, 171). There is a latent object-relations to her account of the binding of subject and object, and it is no coincidence that glamour depends on "reflection" in "charming both ... reader and writer" (Brown's book's final words). Reflection in this sense means sheen, not meditation, and glamour's movement "from aura to charm" (S, 120) is a form of embrace, but a pythonic one. For glamour has its other-killing aspects, a dead-eyed investment in entrancement; and to be entranced, to be hypnotized is to be in thrall, as Brown makes particularly clear in her words on Garbo. One can relish the prospect of being enthralled-presumably that is what people who plonk themselves down for extended Wagner sessions are doing-but to be enthralled is to be swept away, out of one's self, in the service of another's experience (whatever it is that that thing or creature entails). What it entails for the beholder is not to be thinking-a welcome experience, or not, but one legislated as such only after the fact. Angelina Jolie has that effect on me: I find her extraordinarily glamorous, and she clears my head entirely of all thought. This is true glamour, an infectious vapidity. Brown makes clear that the visual register is where glamour exerts its most ferocious grip, and that it is of a killing kind. I have come to think that sophistication is essentially an adult experience, and glamour that of a child (adult- and childhood need not be age-based experiences, and the glamorous are often females replete with secondary sexual characteristics), each founded on grappling with a sceptical or narcissistic relation to the world, but with sophistication in the end holding some promise of acknowledgement, however attenuated. I have elided Hammill's reading of Max Beerbohm's 1911 novel Zuleika Dobson as one concerning sophistication, but in fact the amatory war waged between its eponymous femme fatale and the Duke of Dorset is a battle between glamour and sophistication: she is the gorgeous (and lousy) magician, manipulative, cliche-ridden, and singleminded; he is the sophisticate who kills himself for her because he said he would. Glamour wins. In the end the duke is small potatoes for Zuleika; her real triumph consists in inspiring the mass suicide of the Oxford undergraduate population. The dons don't notice, or if they do, it's either not a problem or it is a blessing for them. So goes the life of the mind. If Clement Greenberg was right and modernism is about the medium coming to terms with itself (so modernist painting, for instance, concerns the means by which painting occurs: paint and canvas, not in that order) I advance the proposition that modernist criticism is in some essential way about the formation of the terms by which criticism occurs: thus its true subject is taste. If this is so, there is every reason to think that criticism concerning itself with sophistication and glamour-along with modernist fashion, snobbery, marketing, artistic and industrial habits of production, etcetera-has hit upon what it is that criticism has to say not just about such topics, each engrossing, but about its place in the history of criticism. All criticism is concerned with trends, their formations, emulations, and abjurals; but modernist criticism may best be concerned today with the formation of taste. It should be interesting to see whether modernist criticism married to a concerted awareness of its place in critical history advances in some palpable way, as Greenberg believed modernist painting to be an advancement in the history of painting. Ethically speaking, sophistication may not be a gift one gives others, and glamour may rely on the other's annihilation, but a skeptical modernist criticism, one which does not take its readers to be mere reflections of its writers (or the critic's text as mirroring the critic), locked in preagreement, may well have something to teach us about what it is that we understand ourselves to be doing, and what it is we do not know. On the other hand, a modernist criticism that takes up the terms of its own formation could well be read as either compensation, optimism (as if our work, despite its crooked front teeth, frizzy hair, and "hint of a double chin" contains "some hidden potential ... waiting to be discovered") 12 or critical narcissism. And if history is any judge, if it comes to be the case that every modernist critic decides to pursue taste as her topic, modernist criticism will become numbing and therefore distasteful. Happily, it remains difficult to predict why scholars find particular things of interest, and one hopes-or this one hopes-that some mystery, some je ne sais quoi, will remain about what comes to count for individual critics as a convincing topic of inquiry. Advancement is good, but I find telos boring. Je ne sais pas pourquoi. Notes 1. Zuleika Dobson (1911; New York: Modern Library, 1998), 186. 2. "But they don't make lipstick." For you, no. 3. Stephen Gundle, Glamour: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 27; hereafter abbreviated GAH. 4. Carol Dyhouse, Glamour: Women, History, Feminism (New York: Zed Books, 2010); hereafter abbreviated WHF. 5. Judith Brown, Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 7; hereafter abbreviated G. 6. Faye Hammill, Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), 6; hereafter abbreviated S. 7. See Michael Fried, "Shape as Form: Frank Stella's Irregular Polygons," in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998), 77-99. 8. Fried, "Shape as Form," 79. 9. I have benefited greatly from the ongoing scholarship of Sarah Terry in matters Thomsonian. 10. Adam Phillips, "Misgivings," London Review of Books 32:14 (22 July 2010): 19-21. 11. Or if she is, she is rhyming her love for him with the love he has for her as someone distinct from whom she believes herself to be; she is approximating the distance he has from her and she from him in a rhyme of endearments based on the cognates of "love." 12. Stephen Gundle, on Greta Gustafsson before becoming Greta Garbo in GAH, 173. If you are much raken with etymology, the connection between sophistication and sophistry might not come as a surprise. This reviewer was amazed and delighted to see Faye Hammill make the case for the relationship between those things considered sophisticated (and thus desirable) and those things that are the result of sophistty (and are thus suspicious). In Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History, Hammill takes as a given that we now exist in a historical moment obsessed with fame, celebrity, and glamour, and thus we are at ease with the idea of sophistication. Although the reviewer takes some gentle exception to this idea, Hammill makes good use of the notion that we used to despise artifice and now love it, or at least we are attracted to the studied layers of artifice that mark one as sophisticated. Sophistication is a fascinating cultural history, which examines the various valences in what it means to be cultivated, glamorous, and refined, as well as specious, adulterated, and affected. Hammill elects to make her case through an archive comprised primarily of written narrative, rather than images, and she notes that an alternate cultural history of sophistication could well be structured through pictures. Relying on multiple genres of texts starting in the eighteenth century and moving into the twentieth and referencing those authors who are familiar (Austen, Burney, James, Fitzgerald, Nabokov) as well as those who deserve to be remem-bered (Daisy Ashford, Max Beerbohm, Francoise Sagan, Winfred Watson), Hammill persuasively argues for the manner in which "sophistication connects unexpected groups of texts together, and can form the basis for a reading practice which transcends categories of genre, nation, and language, and crosses boundaries between high and low, literary and commercial, serious and frivolous" (22). This in itself is no small objective, and Hammill skillfully takes the reader on an edifying tour of materials, each working ro support her thesis that the cultural manufacture of-and societal attitude toward-sophistication in turn offers a telling corollary text about class, gender, sexuality, nation, and norms of taste. Hammilllets her argument unfold in chronological order, each chapter devoted to a different period; the Romantics, the Vicrorians and Edwardians, the early twentieth century, and post-World War II. Each chapter is rich with fresh obser-vations that make this book a pleasure to read. At every moment, the reader feels in the hands of a trusted guide whose well-written prose offers a helpful template for sorting through a mass of diverse literature. The reviewer's only critique is that Hammilllimited herself to primarily British and American materials. Since the concept of sophistication filters through the lens of Western moderniry, it would have been interesting to see her look outside of a transatlantic frame for further evaluation of sophistication's reach. Perhaps we can look forward to such analysis in future work. Each chapter is rich with fresh observations that make this book a pleasure to read. At every moment, the reader feels in the hands of a trusted guide whose well-written prose offers a helpful template for sorting through a mass of diverse literature. Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History. By Faye Hammill. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010. viii + 232 pages. Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture. By Catherine Keyser. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010. xii + 226 pages. The overlapping categories of "smartness" and "sophistication" acquire special resonance in the 1920s, particularly in the metropolitan milieu of New York slick magazines like Vanity Fair. Signifying savvy urbanity and applying to fashionable poses, commodities, and literary styles alike, these terms paradoxically circulate both as signs of distinction and as marketing labels that invite consumers to join an in-group for the price of a new dress or accoutrement. Two new books make a considerable contribution to cultural history by exploring this common terrain of social hierarchy, taste, and style through a series of close readings-the sine qua non of literary criticism. Faye Hammill's study, Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History, traces the evolution of modern sophistication across an impressive range of texts from the eighteenth century to the present, concentrating on novels and plays, with illuminating forays into magazines, films, and the internet; predominantly Anglo-American in its focus, the study crosses national boundaries as well, including Italian, Russian, and French examples. Catherine Keyser's Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Magazine Culture, part of a burgeoning field of modernist periodical studies, focuses on a selection of popular women writers who contributed to "smart magazines" such as Vanity Fair in the 1920s and 1930s or responded to the ideal of chic femininity promulgated in their pages. However different in their scope and aims, these studies unite in their deep exegesis of key terms in a lexicon of cultural distinction and in their devotion of serious scholarly attention to disparaged "middlebrow" writers and genres. The category of the middlebrow has been usefully theorized in a number of recent works including Mary Grover's The Ordeal of Warwick Deeping: Middlebrow Authorship and Cultural Embarrassment (2009) and in discussions fostered by the ternational Middlebrow Network, an online academic forum of which Hammill is a founding member ebrow- network.com/). Scholarship on the middlebrow has worked to complicate the high/low binary influentially theorized by Andreas Huyssen in his book After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1986). Emerging in the modern period as a term of derision, "middlebrow" has been applied to readers and texts alike that combine high and low in a vexing manner-succumbing to the allure of easy pleasure while retaining the pretense of sophistication. Until recently, the perception of middlebrow writing as commercial, accessible, and ideologically conservative, in contrast to the valorized difficulty of high modernism positioned in opposition to the marketplace, has persisted in modernist studies. Clearly, ideas of cultural capital are bound up in these categories. "From its inception," Grover notes, "the term 'middlebrow' is being used to heighten the cultural distinction of the users of such a term" ([Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2009], 36). Hammill's earlier Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture Between the Wars worked against this characterization of the middlebrow as a naive, "aspirational form of imitation," arguing that it constituted a savvy and self-conscious form of writing that used "irony to mock pretension" ([Austin: U of Texas P, 2007], 7). Sophistication and Playing Smart continue the mapping of this new field that envisions the middlebrow as more complicated in tone, theme, and ideology than previously assumed. With examples ranging from Jane Austen to Sophia Coppola, Hammill's study traces a discursive shift in the concept of "sophistication" from a derogatory term-signifying falsification, speciousness, adulteration, and pernicious French influence-to the modern, laudatory sense that emerged in the nineteenth century, connoting worldliness, refinement, and distinction. Since the word itself does not often appear in the texts she considers, Hammill pays close attention to related concepts such as refinement, subtlety, elegance, urbanity, glamour, and so on, taking her cue from Raymond Williams's Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976). On the whole, the approach is compelling, though the multiplication of descriptors sometimes compromises definitional clarity, a probably unavoidable consequence of treating so much material across a broad historical, geographic, and generic range. Among Hammill's stated aims is to analyze the "politics of sophistication, especially in relation to class, taste and cultural hierarchy, and also in relation to gender and sexuality" (5). The latter categories, gender and sexuality, receive only slight treatment, but the former are amply explored, building on the influential work of Pierre Bourdieu. Hammill's work complements a number of recent literary studies in this field, most notably Joseph Litvak's Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory, and the Novel (1997), which explores the topic from a queer studies perspective, and Sean Latham's "Am I a Snob?": Modernism and the Novel, which traces a parallel evolution of the figure of the snob from "a vulgar pretender into arrogant master of tasteful refinement" ([Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2003], 33). The first of Sophistication's four chapters examines the "broad tendency" in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries "to associate sophistication with moral laxity and self-indulgence" (26). Hammill positions sophistication in relation to the discourse of "sensibility" in the period, arguing that the protagonists of Fanny Burney's Evelina, or, The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World (1778) and Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814) "inhabit this overdetermined space between sophistication and sensibility: they are very much associated with deep feeling, but also with discrimination and refinement" (33). These novels are finally unconvincing in their denunciation of sophistication, Hammill argues, since the characters who exemplify "London stylishness and lax morality" are much more appealing than the "unsophisticated" and "artless" heroines (51). Demonstrating her generic and transatlantic range, Hammill ends the chapter with an interesting reading of Frances Trollope's 1832 travel book, Domestic Manners of the Americans; or Characteristic Sketches of the People of the United States, in which, Hammill shows, Trollope constructs herself as a sophisticate by deploring American deficiencies in "taste, elegance, delicacy, leisure, and refinement" (56). Hammill's second chapter concentrates on the figures of the dandy and the Victorian child, arguing that sophistication is "both more desirable and more perilous" in Victorian and Edwardian texts than in those of the romantic era (76). Henry James's Daisy Miller: A Study (1878) exemplifies this tension, balancing the pejorative and approbatory senses of "sophistication" by pitting an "unsophisticated" American protagonist against European worldliness. In addition to Lewis Carroll's Alice books (1865-71), Hammill discusses child author Daisy Ashford's novel The Young Visiters (written in 1890 when the author was only nine years old and published in 1919), a surprising and inspired choice. She argues that the narrator's inconsistent tone blends naivete about social taboos with sophisticated observations about manners and class. Hammill looks at "sophistication" (and its absence) as a narrative technique as well, arguing that Ashford's childish idiom was appreciated by audiences capable of prizing the "faked unsophistication" of modernist works by authors like James Joyce and Gertrude Stein (101). Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson (1911) exemplifies, in contrast, "a sophisticated narrative," defined as "one in which few fixed positions are taken, and which addresses a reader capable of accepting paradox" (117). In Hammill's last chapter, she includes a fresh reading of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955) as a text about sophistication and seduction (though one wonders again about the gendered implications of sexualizing sophistication) and an illuminating analysis of Genevieve Antoine Dariaux's "handbook of chic," A Guide to Elegance (1964). Hammill reads these texts as "deliberately anachronistic in their privileging of a leisured lifestyle" (167). She concludes the book with a rapid tour through contemporary radio broadcasts, magazine references, film, and websites. But it is in her third chapter, which focuses on the 1920s and 1930s, that Hammill most directly challenges the stereotype of the middlebrow. Here she considers fiction by Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald, along with two "middlebrow novels": Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm (1932) and Winifred Watson's Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (1939). Hammill argues that in Gibbons's and Watson's novels, the suburb emerges as "a crucial site for the development of a sophisticated middlebrow aesthetic" (139). Her discussion raises several questions, leaving room for further study: How is middlebrow sophistication different in kind from the dandy's or aesthete's? Does sophistication only become a social category when it becomes a commodity-in fiction, magazines, and films that package leisure class style and pursuits for a middle class who cannot afford to fully inhabit these roles? Hammill does consider the commodification of sophistication in a brief but useful section illuminating Vanity Fair's periodical codes. Recent critics of Vanity Fair have cast it as a product of mass culture-a misconception Hammill redresses by positioning it in a middle ground between "the author-centered production model of avantgarde magazines and the market-driven arena of ... mass circulation weeklies" (157). Hammill maintains that though Vanity Fair pretends to address "an already sophisticated metropolitan elite," it actually offers an "education in sophistication" for aspirant readers (155). Like Hammill, Keyser uses Vanity Fair to revise our understanding of the middlebrow, arguing that smart women writers for such mass circulation magazines produced middlebrow culture that was neither sentimental nor domestic, but instead characterized by razor-sharp wit. Smart, as Keyser defines it, was at once a coveted marketing label for a group of elite magazines, a fashionable social posture shaped by celebrity culture, and a "facilitating tactic" for these writers-a strategic doubleness that enabled these writers to use humor to expose stereotypes of femininity in which they themselves participated. Keyser's terms overlap with Hammill's, for smartness signifies, along with wit, "wealthy and elite status ... fashion sense and sex appeal" (6); but rather than tracking the concept's evolution over time, Keyser situates her study (1914-36) squarely within the modernist period and makes a number of significant interventions in that domain, while remaining relevant for all readers interested in women writers, periodical studies, humor writing, and questions of cultural hierarchy. Keyser's contributions to these fields include her shrewd theorization of smartness as both a performative category and a rhetorical tool and her serious consideration of a set of women writers whose very popularity has contributed to their critical neglect. Playing Smart also takes humor seriously, drawing on psychoanalytic understandings of humor and aggression to show that wit and satire are weapons these writers use to pierce the "phantasmal female body" that circulates in the magazines: beautiful, flawless, ever young (15). As Keyser chronicles, the double connotation of "smart" as fashionable appearance and witty intellect points to the tension in public conceptions of the modern woman as both passive consumer and threatening agent. In the hands of the witty writers Keyser considers, the smartness tactic sometimes upholds the status quo (defining the female subject as "consumer, sex object, charming companion"), and at other times subverts it, unmasking smartness itself as a pose and drawing attention to its constraints through exaggeration and self-consciousness (6). The first section of Playing Smart examines the writers who minted the smart style in their 1920s contributions to Vanity Fair, beginning with Edna St. Vincent Millay. Writing a series of satires for Vanity Fair u

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Winner of ESSE Book Awards (Literatures in the English Language) 2012

Review Text

''Sophistication'' eludes definition, and yet provocatively invites us to pursue, capture and possess it." So Faye Hammill begins her fascinating and engaging study of the je ne sais quoi of sophistication in literature and culture from the 18th century to the present day. By general cultural consensus, sophistication seems to be something one possesses rather than learns; to need to ask how one becomes sophisticated is to necessarily exclude oneself from ever being so. Yet, as Hammill demonstrates, almost without exception the literature of sophistication of the past three centuries has been preoccupied, more or less overtly, with providing an education in sophistication, at the same time as presenting it as the reserve of a discriminating elite.An important aspect of Hammill''s exploration of sophistication is the changing meaning of the word from its etymological origins in ancient Greece to the present day, and the traces of earlier connotations still to be found in its ambiguous modern usage. Derived from the Ancient Greek for "wisdom", sophia, but also the Greek sophist philosophers, with their emphasis on the power of persuasive rhetoric over logical argument, sophistication was for a long time a negative quality, suggestive of falsity or deception.Up until the end of the 19th century, we learn, for example, that the English-speaking world was deeply suspicious of the attitude of sophistication, as evidenced in the derogatory terms by which it was described; frivolous, insincere, perverse and, perhaps most typically damning, French. For English commentators in the 1790s, sophistication was a marker of French decadence in contrast to the more solid values of English moral virtue.It is ironic, then, that it was the English phenomenon of the dandy, the elegant self-made man epitomised by the Regency arbiter of understated sartorial style Beau Brummell, that would contribute most to the modern understanding of "sophistication" as signifying taste and refinement. Fleeing the country to escape gambling debts in 1816, Brummell died penniless in an insane asylum in France, but his influence continued on both sides of the Channel, to be developed in a more metaphorical sense by the poet Charles Baudelaire, who described the dandy as having "no profession other than elegance", his refinement defined by "the aristocratic superiority of his mind".Hammill''s analysis covers an impressive historical and literary breadth, paying attention to canonical literary texts - from the late 18th-century satire of Richard Sheridan''s The School for Scandal, to Henry James'' novel of fatal sophistication Daisy Miller, and No

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"Original in focus, critically nuanced and written with humour and lan, Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History is smart, subtle and intelligent; much like its subject."--Times Higher Education "A book for those interested in how cultural values and therefore human behavior change over time. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students and above."--Ihoice "Each chapter is rich with fresh observations that make this book a pleasure to read. At every moment, the reader feels in the hands of a trusted guide whose well-written prose offers a helpful template for sorting through a mass of diverse literature."--The Historian "An innovative, well-written and clearly structured book, well-researched in terms of literary and cultural history... Its principal contribution is the establishment of productive links between the study of literature, fashion and technology in a wide historical scope, from Sentimentalism to late Modernism. This makes the book a unique contribution to both literary and cultural studies."--ESSE 2012 Judging Panel

Details ISBN1846312329 Author Faye Hammill Short Title SOPHISTICATION Publisher Liverpool University Press Language English ISBN-10 1846312329 ISBN-13 9781846312328 Media Book Format Hardcover Year 2010 Imprint Liverpool University Press Subtitle A Literary and Cultural History Place of Publication Liverpool Country of Publication United Kingdom DEWEY 306 Illustrations 2 black & white illustrations UK Release Date 2010-05-01 Publication Date 2010-05-01 AU Release Date 2010-05-01 NZ Release Date 2010-05-01 Pages 240 Audience General

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  • Condition: Brand New
  • ISBN-13: 9781846312328
  • Book Title: Sophistication
  • ISBN: 9781846312328
  • Publication Year: 2010
  • Type: Textbook
  • Format: Hardcover
  • Language: English
  • Publication Name: Sophistication: a Literary and Cultural History
  • Item Height: 239mm
  • Author: Faye Hammill
  • Publisher: Liverpool University Press
  • Item Width: 163mm
  • Subject: History
  • Number of Pages: 240 Pages

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