ABSTRACT
In the last two chapters we have seen how discourses of primitivism infected the modernist approach to idiocy in early twentieth-century Europe. A discussion of the place of the idiot figure in American culture requires both a shift of geographical perspective and a consideration of the literary trends that contributed to the development of modernism across the Atlantic. The emergence of an experimental wave of American writing in the early twentieth century can be explained largely as a reaction to social and urban transition in the Progressive period following the Civil War. While the literary scene in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was dominated by realism and the commitment to document social life, this project started to diversify in the last decade of the century.
