Inventing the American Southwest: Region, romance, and the anthropology of culture

This study analyzes the Anglo-American invention of the Southwest between 1890 and 1930 to reconsider regionalism as a strategy for negotiating access to a plurality of cultures within American society: local communities within national boundaries, diverse classes of readers, and stratified fields of literary production. Anglo-American writers, artists, photographers and anthropologists, with the help of native informants, freely appropriated the Southwest's local materials to produce an art and imagine a diverse society they claimed to be distinctly American. My dissertation reconstructs the conditions of this problematic collaboration and identifies its literary problematic as imagined transcription.;The first half of the study demonstrates how the promotional writing of Charles Lummis and the popular fiction of Zane Grey advanced a conception of the Southwest as a romantic and regenerative realm. Lummis's rhetoric of discovery shifted the function of region from identity to commodity and thus made the Southwest available for literary appropriation. Grey's early Westerns then imagined the Southwest as a source of traditional values and an ideal community of readers by replacing the legitimating relations of communal authority with the symbolic cohesion of individuals and readers shaped by "the crucible of the desert.".;The second half of the dissertation focuses on literary representations of the Southwest. Mary Austin's Land of Little Rain (1903) and The American Rhythm (1923) demonstrate the imperative of transcribing authentic experience at the center of many of the region's modernist texts. The third chapter reads Austin's work against the naturalist writings of John Muir, D. H. Lawrence's St. Mawr (1924) and primitivism, and ethnographic translations to analyze the effects of authorial position and changing conceptions of culture on emerging forms of regional literature. The final chapter classifies Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) as a "late imperial romance" that complicates the early regionalism of O Pioneers! and My Antonia and confronts the limitations of viewing the Southwest through Euro-American eyes.;Together these works prove the formation of a new regionalism that represents the changing dynamic of cultural contact and provides us with an important model for understanding the Southwest's new tradition of Native American and Chicano literatures. At issue are the means by which writers communicate local experience to an increasingly fragmented audience, readers learn new practices for interpreting noncanonical literature, and a diverse nation constructs its history of consent and difference.