Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History

In an era obsessed with celebrity and glamour, `sophistication' has come to be perceived as the most desirable of qualities, but it was not always so. In this fascinating book Faye Hammill explores how a word that once connoted 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Ranging widely across historical documents, magazines, adverts, films and novels, this path-breaking book will be essential reading for sophisticates and scholars alike.

`Hammill's highly original work has impressive breadth and covers a remarkable number of the essential literary texts on the topic, from Sheridan and Jane Austen to Sofia Coppola.' Professor Aaron Jaffe, University of Louisville

Dr Faye Hammill is a Senior Lecturer at Strathclyde University. 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).