Title: Inventing the American primitive
Subtitle: politics, gender, and the representation of Native American literary traditions, 1789-1936
First published: 1996
Description: American 'mainstream' culture has always been fascinated with the notion of the 'primitive', particularly as embodied by Native Americans. In Inventing the American Primitive, Helen Carr illustrates how responses to the existence of Native American traditions have shaped ideas of American identity and American literature.

Inventing the American Primitive examines a body of work, both literary and anthropological, that describes, inscribes, translates and transforms Native American myths and poetry. Drawing on post-colonial and feminist theory, as well as ethnography's recent textual turn, Carr reveals the conflicts and ambivalence in these texts. Through their writings, the writers and anthropologists studied were attempting to preserve a culture which their country, with their help or connivance, sought to destroy.

The contradictions and tensions of this position run throughout their work. Although there is no simple narrative of progress in this story as it moves from the eighteenth-century primitivism to tweentieth-century modernism, the book shows the process by which the richness and complexity of Native American traditions came to be acknowledged.

. Inventing the American Primitive offers a radical new reading of American literary history, as well as fresh insights into the powerful pull of primitivism in United States culture, and into the interactions of gender and race ideologies.
Subjects: Historiography, Ethnic relations in literature, Indian influences, Indian authors, Politics and literature, National characteristics, American, in literature, Indians of North America, Literature and anthropology, Sex role in literature, History and criticism, American literature, Appreciation, Civilization, Intellectual life, Indians in literature, Primitivism in literature, History, American literature, history and criticism, American literature, indian authors, National characteristics, american, Indians of north america, history, United states, social life and customs
Places: United States
LC classification: PS173.I6 C37 1996