"Sapphic Primitivism is a fascinating and first-rate study that makes an exciting contribution to ongoing reassessments of modernism, literary lesbianism, and the cultural politics of the twentieth century. Hacketts notion of Sapphic primitivism proves to be an excellent interpretive tool, a high-powered lens that brings into focus texts that have been misread or under-read."¾ Marilee Lindemann, author of Willa Cather: Queering America

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 Schreiners proto-modernist exploration of New Womanhood, The Story of an African Farm; Virginia Woolfs high modernist "play-poem," The Waves; Sylvia Townsend Warners historical novel, Summer Will Show; and Willa Cathers 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.

Robin Hackett is an assistant professor of English at the University of New Hampshire.