| In postwar Europe and America, artists and writers defined the primitive in opposition to the mechanization and bureaucratic restraints of modern society. In their efforts to challenge bourgeois norms and establish counter-cultural identities, writers embraced those qualities that they attributed to so-called primitives: innocence, sexual freedom, creativity, spontaneity, sensuality, and a connection to the unconscious. In literature, the primitive appeared most often in the guise of the exotic Other: the geographically distant, racially marked, sexually deviant, or otherwise alien body that simultaneously threatened, and attracted, modern sensibilities. However, by the mid 1930s, primitivism was connected to fascist politics, since fascist rhetoric often appealed to an idealized past. In this dissertation, I argue that Djuna Barnes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Virginia Woolf reconfigure the primitive as a modern Western construction rather than an essentialist disposition or evolutionist category in their 1930s texts.;In each chapter I examine how an emerging method or theory in the human sciences influenced a modernist author and shaped her respective interwar text. By restricting my project to a brief period (1934--1941) and to a small selection of British and American modernist texts from several genres (Tell My Horse, Nightwood, Between the Acts, and A Sketch of the Past) and by focusing on specific cross-disciplinary influences, I am able to discern how three contemporary writers adopt similar formal and rhetorical techniques to critique a movement within modernist literature that had gained troubling resonances in the 1930s. Through my close-readings, I identify a pattern that connects these works and suggests a significant trend in 1930s modernist writing. I argue that in the mid to late 1930s, leading up to the second world war, modernists writers approached idealistic representations of the primitive suspiciously across genres, and participated actively, if indirectly, in their deconstruction. |
