Product Placement: Literary Modernism and Crisco

In a highly original contribution, Gail McDonald (Southampton University) demonstrates the connection between modernist literature and marketing by discussing the fortunes of Crisco, a hydrogenated cooking fat advertised during the early decades of the twentieth century. Exploring the concepts of branding, tradition, use and value, McDonald points towards the negotiations between the intellectual and commercial and between the real and the ‘other-worldly’ in modernist literature, whilst also considering the limits of such an enterprise.