Disciplines History Native American History

Savagism and Civilization by Roy Harvey Pearce

Savagism and Civilization A Study of the Indian and the American Mind

by Roy Harvey Pearce (Author), Arnold Krupat (Foreword)
May 1988
First Edition
Paperback
$31.95, £27.00 eBook
$31.95, £27.00
Title Details

Rights: Available worldwide
Pages: 272
ISBN: 9780520908673

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About the Book Table of Contents Related Books

About the Book

First published in 1953, revised in 1964, and presented here with a new foreword by Arnold Krupat and new postscript by the author, Roy Harvey Pearce's Savagism and Civilization is a classic in the genre of history of ideas. Examining the political pamphlets, missionaries' reports, anthropologists' accounts, and the drama, poetry, and novels of the 18th and early 19th centuries, Professor Pearce traces the conflict between the idea of the noble savage and the will to Christianize the heathen and appropriate their land, which ended with the near extermination of Native American culure.

FOREWORD: Arnold Krupat
PREFACE

PART 1: Antecedents and Origins, 1609-1777
  I Spirituals and Temporals: The Indian in Colonial Civilization

PART 2: The Life and Death of the American Savage, 1777-1851
  II A Melancholy Fact: The Indian in American Life
  III Character and Circumstance: The Idea of Savagism
  IV The Zero of Human Society: The Idea of the Savage
  V An Impassable Gulf: The Social and Historical Image
  VI The Virtues of Nature: The Image in Drama and Poetry
  VII Red Gifts and White: The Image in Fiction

PART 3: Afterthoughts, 1851-
  VIII After a Century of Dishonor: The Idea of Civilization

POSTSCRIPT
INDEX