'A living lump of appetites': the reinvention of the primitive in naturalist and modernist literature

When we consider the historical and cultural events that mark the latenineteenth through early twentieth centuries, we discover a growing fear about the "vanishing Anglo-Saxon." This response to the non-Anglo-Saxon or "primitive" differs significantly, however, from earlier, more romantic definitions and philosophies wherein the primitive is considered a positive alternative to civilization. While earlier eras conceive of the primitive as positive, these eras' judgments change as one considers turn of the twentieth-century American literature. It is this reassessment of the primitive that is the focus of my study. am particularly interested in how these ruminations about the primitive are codified scientifically and developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this dissertation, I examine selected literature written during the naturalist and modernist movements in order to determine the degree to which these texts advance theories about the primitive that participate in an agenda of fear and loathing. Pivotal to my study is a trajectory of the primitive that shows its many forms, its changes and contradictions, and the degree to which naturalist and modernist texts draw upon earlier romantic images of the primitive and transmogrify them.