ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that some major factors which have affected modern primitivism while the preceding discussions of individual works indicate something of the different uses to which it has been put. In her study of primitivism in Sturm und Drang literature, Edith A. Runge isolates many qualities which mutatis mutandis are equally evident in English romanticism; qualities that may be largely summed up as the acceptance of a certain view of external ‘nature’ and a corresponding view of the ‘natural’ in man as a moral and emotional centre of value. The influential view that the primitive psychology is radically different from the civilized not only supports the romantic belief in a comparable polarity in modes of mental life but it leads to a similarly ambivalent interpretation. The modern primitivism discussed in this study, then, is part of a general concern in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the subconscious mind and anti-rational modes of understanding.
