Modern Primitives: Race and Language in Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Zora Neale Hurston

This book explores the ways in which the American writers Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Zora Neale Hurston used modernist primitivism to assert a uniquely American literary identity in the face of European cultural hegemony.

The extended Introduction traces the history of primitivism from a classical rhetorical trope to its emergence in the twentieth century as aesthetic, exemplified by Picasso and his use of African masks, that combined new work in the human sciences especially anth...