Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History. By FayeHammill. 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 devotionof 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 ofWarwick 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 (http://www.middlebrow- 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''searlier 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). Thelatter categories, gender and sexuality, receive only slight treatment, but the former are amply explored, building on theinfluential work of Pierre Bourdieu. Hammill''s work complements a number of recent literary studies in this field, most notablyJoseph 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 naiveté 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 n.