Description
Book SynopsisIs there a "great divide" between highbrow and mass cultures? Are modernist novels for, by, and about snobs? What might Lord Peter Wimsey, Mrs. Dalloway, and Stephen Dedalus have to say to one another? Sean Latham's appealingly written book Am I a...
Trade ReviewThe book is extremely readable, and its subject matter is so that undergraduates as well as the most informed modernist scholars will find it offers original and helpful insights. Latham uses the question Virginia Woolf posed in the title of a paper she delivered privately to her Bloomsbury friends—Am I a snob?—which invites one to become an integral part of the meaning-making process at the same time it instructs, informs, and promotes collaboration between reader and author. Latham's book is therefore a valuable pedagogical tool and an important critical contribution to Woolf and modernist studies.
-- Shannon Forbes * Woolf Studies Annual *
Because Latham addresses the important question of elitism inherent in modernism and, in particular interest to us readers of this periodical, the elitist aura of intellectual snobbery in the marketing and reading of Joyce's works. Joyce is both an ideal test case for Latham's analysis of the elitist and the marketplace and the best proof of his argument. Latham succeeds in his claims, to his credit and to our discomfort.... In this convincing and perceptive book, Latham demonstrates that the readers of this journal are snobs.
-- Roy Gottfried * James Joyce Literary Supplement *
In this concise work on the relationship between snobbery and modernism, Latham traces the transformation of the word snob, which once meant a lower-class person trying to copy his superiors and now means a person aware of artistic values.... Although some of Latham's observations are highly debatable, they are always intriguing and thought-provoking. Recommended for literature collections at academic and larger public libraries.
* Library Journal *
Table of ContentsThe logic of the pose - Thackeray and the invention of snobbery; The importance of being a snob - Oscar Wilde's modern pretensions; Elegy for the snob - Virginia Woolf and the Victorians; "An aristocrat in writing" - Virginia Woolf and the invention of the modern snob; A portrait of the snob - James Joyce and the anxieties of cultural capital; Deadly pretensions - Dorothy L. Sayers and the ends of culture; The problem of snobbery.
