{"product_id":"sapphic-primitivism","title":"Sapphic Primitivism","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn this book, 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 vary widely in their form and content and include Olive Schreiner’s proto-modernist exploration of New Womanhood, \u003ci\u003eThe Story of an African Farm\u003c\/i\u003e; Virginia Woolf’s high modernist “play-poem,” \u003ci\u003eThe Waves\u003c\/i\u003e; Sylvia Townsend Warner’s historical novel, \u003ci\u003eSummer Will Show\u003c\/i\u003e; and Willa Cather’s Southern pastoral, \u003ci\u003eSapphira and the Slave Girl\u003c\/i\u003e. In each, blackness and working-class culture are figured to represent sexual autonomy, including lesbianism, for white women. Sapphic primitivism exposes the ways several classes of identification were intertwined with the development of homosexual identities at the turn of the century. Sapphic primitivism 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’s revelations of the mutual interests of those who study early twentieth-century constructions of race and sexuality and twenty-first-century feminists doing anti-racist and queer work are a major contribution to literary studies and identity theory.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Hackett, Robin","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43574228091062,"sku":"9780813533476","price":29.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0251\/4980\/0541\/files\/9780813533476_988dd023-0e6a-467a-8cf7-1b8d9f517d6d.jpg?v=1739975377","url":"https:\/\/combined-academic.myshopify.com\/products\/sapphic-primitivism","provider":"Combined Academic Publishers - Mare Nostrum Group","version":"1.0","type":"link"}