Marketing the Southwest: Modernism, the Fred Harvey Company, and the Indian Detour

• Elizabeth Lloyd Oliphant ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Pittsburgh

     University of Pittsburgh

     City of Pittsburgh, Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: American literature: A journal of literary history, criticism and bibliography, ISSN 0002-9831, ISSN-e 1527-2117, Vol. 89, Nº 1, 2017, págs. 91-119
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • This essay analyzes the mutually influential relationship between literary modernism and tourism as those two interests converged around the US Southwest in the early twentieth century. Modernist writers were drawn to the Southwest’s folk and Native American cultures, viewing them as potent sources of artistic inspiration. However, those same modernists had a significant hand in shaping the region’s burgeoning tourism industry. These surprising commercial collaborations offer the opportunity for a more nuanced understanding of modernism’s relationship to commercial work. The essay focuses on a promotional brochure produced for the Harvey Company’s sightseeing “Indian Detour” experience. The brochure, distributed to passengers on the Indian Detour, featured essays and poetry contributed by modernist writers including Witter Bynner, Alice Corbin Henderson, and Harriet Monroe. The essay also brings to light the connections between this promotional brochure and back issues of Monroe’s Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, further underscoring the close ties between commercial tourism and literary modernism.