Аннотация:This article contends that the American Indian characters in early modern French texts do not necessarily and automatically embody the author's primitivist understanding of cultural difference. Its focus is on Baron de Lahontan who is credited with the invention of the ‘noble savage paradigm’ in eighteenth-century ethnography (Olson). It begins with an overview of the traditional interpretations of Lahontan's texts as primitivist ideology. It challenges these criticisms with an exegesis of the /Dialogues/, the text most often associated with Lahontan's primitivism. My analysis contends that Lahontan deploys the figure of the American Indian with critical views of France to argue against the Jesuits, not to enact a primitivist desire for uncorrupted state of nature. My rereading of Lahontan's text has two aims. First, I seek to complicate the idea that a generalized figure of the other always represents the author's primitivist ideology. Lahontan's descriptions do not manifest a primitivist presumption; they use a fictive construct to argue against it. Second, I aim to show the importance of acknowledging the literary in our readings of early modern contact literature.
