Sophisticated Innocence

Quote of the day:

We might posit, for example, a critic of naturalism who has read a great many novels from Defoe to the recent past but little else. This reader would have a kind of sophisticated innocence. He would possess much awareness of how fiction works as an art form and of major changes in the form of the novel throughout its history, but he would be unaware of all matters involving the origins and the ideological and cultural context of particular moments in the history of the form.

-  Donald Pizer, Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (1984), 33.