ABSTRACT
The nostalgia of civilized man for a return to a primitive or pre-civilized condition is as old it seems as his civilized capacity for self-reflection. It must be recognized at the outset, then, that the term primitivism properly refers to a dauntingly ancient and universal human characteristic with a correspondingly wide range of manifestations. The meaning and value of the primitivist urge is itself the central issue and it is explored in such a way as to genuinely disturb civilized responses and assumptions in a way that is not typical of the established literary conventions. For Heart of Darkness such categories as ‘primitivist’ and ‘anti-primitivist’ are meaningless and such modern works, which in themselves comprise an inward exploration of the primitivist impulse, provide a rich ground for examining the problems of primitivist motifs and feeling in literature generally.
