Sapphic primitivism : productions of race, class, and sexuality in key works of modern fiction / Robin Hackett.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hackett, Robin, 1963-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Schreiner, Olive, 1855-1920--Characters--Women.

Schreiner, Olive.

Warner, Sylvia Townsend, 1893-1978. Summer will show.

Warner, Sylvia Townsend.

Cather, Willa, 1873-1947--Characters--Women.

Cather, Willa.

Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941. Waves.

Woolf, Virginia.

Cather, Willa, 1873-1947.

Schreiner, Olive, 1855-1920.

English fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Lesbians in literature.

English fiction--Women authors--History and criticism.

English fiction--Women authors.

Modernism (Literature)--Great Britain.

Modernism (Literature).

Great Britain.

Homosexuality and literature.

Social classes in literature.

Primitivism in literature.

Race in literature.

Sex in literature.

Physical Description:

x, 189 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, [2004]

Summary:

Robin Hackett examines portrayals of race, class, and sexuality in modernist texts by white women to argue for the existence of a literary device that she calls "Sapphic primitivism." The works covered vary widely in their form and content, and include Olive Schreiner's proto-modernist exploration of New Womanhood, The Story of an African Farm; Virginia Woolf's high modernist "play-poem," The Waves; Sylvia Townsend Warner's historical novel, Summer Will Show; and Willa Cather's Southern pastoral, Sapphira and the Slave Girl. In each, blackness and working-class culture are seen as representing sexual autonomy, including lesbianism, for white women.

Sapphic Primitivism exposes the ways that several classes of identification were intertwined with the development of homosexual identities at the turn of the century. "Sapphic primitivism" as a concept is not, however, a means of disguising lesbian content. Rather, it is an aesthetic displacement device that simultaneously exposes lesbianism and exploits modern, primitivist modes of self-representation. Hackett provides a major contribution to literary studies and identity theory with revelations of the mutual interests of those who study early twentieth-century constructions of race and sexuality, and twenty-first-century feminists doing antiracist and queer work.

Contents:

Sapphic primitivism, an introduction

The homosexual primitivism of modernism

Olive Schreiner and the late Victorian new woman

Empire, social rot, and sexual fantasy in The waves

Class, race and lesbian erotics in Summer will show

Jezebel and Sapphira : Willa Cather's monstrous sapphists.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 151-181) and index.

ISBN:

0813533465

0813533473

OCLC:

51905767