River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi Before Mark Twain (Southern Literary Studies) [Hardcover]

Thomas Ruys Smith (Author)

Book Description

Series: Southern Literary Studies | Publication Date: June 2007

Even in the decades before Mark Twain enthralled the world with his evocative representations of the Mississippi, the river played an essential role in American culture and consciousness. Throughout the antebellum era, the Mississippi acted as a powerful symbol of America's conception of itself—and the world's conception of America.

As Twain understood, "The Mississippi is well worth reading about." Thomas Ruys Smith's River of Dreams is an examination of the Mississippi's role in the imagination of the times, and explores its cultural position in antebellum literature, art, thought, and national life.

Presidents, politicians, authors, poets, painters, and international celebrities of every variety experienced the Mississippi in its Golden Age. They left an extraordinary collection of representations of the river in their wake, images which developed as America itself changed. From Thomas Jefferson's vision for the Mississippi to Andrew Jackson and the rowdy river culture of the early nineteenth century, Smith charts the Mississippi’s shifting importance in the making of the nation. In contrast, he examines the accounts of European travelers, including Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray, whose notorious views of the river were heavily influenced by the world of the steamboat and plantation slavery.

As the antebellum period progresses, Smith discusses the importance of visual representations of the Mississippi, exploring the ways in which views of the river, particularly giant moving panoramas that toured the world, echoed notions of manifest destiny and the westward movement. He evokes the river in the late antebellum years as a place of crime and mystery, especially in popular writing, and most notably in Herman Melville’s "The ConfidenceMan." An epilogue discusses the Mississippi during the Civil War, when possession of the river became vital, symbolically as well as militarily. The epilogue also provides an introduction to Mark Twain, a product of the antebellum river world who was to resurrect its imaginative potential for a postwar nation and produce an iconic Mississippi that still flows through a wide and fertile floodplain in American literature.

From empire building in the Louisiana Purchase to the trauma of the Civil War, the Mississippi’s dominant symbolic meanings tracked the essential forces operating within the nation. As Smith shows in this groundbreaking work, the story of the imagined Mississippi River is the story of antebellum America itself. AUTHOR BIO: Thomas Ruys Smith is a lecturer in American literature and culture at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Smith quotes presidents, politicians, authors, poets, painters, and celebrities who describe the way they experienced and imagined the Mississippi River in the antebellum years. He examines what he calls the Mississippi's turbulent transformation into an American river after the Revolution and tells the story of the river as a magnetic frontier. Smith analyzes the accounts of such travelers as Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, and Frances Trollope and examines the river's importance in the making of the nation from the era of Thomas Jefferson to that of Andrew Jackson. He discusses its cultural position in antebellum art, literature, and thought. With 26 halftones, this book is part of the Southern Literary Studies series--and a lively and wide-ranging account of this majestic body of water. George Cohen
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Review

"River of Dreams is a rich study, splendidly researched and elegantly written [...] indeed, it is quite dazzling." --Southern Literary Journal

 "This is a valuable book and should be in the collections of anyone concerned with re-presenting place, early Americana, The River, and certainly Mark Twain." --Arkansas Review

"River of Dreams is an impressive achievement [...]  an intelligent, original, and imaginative contribution to American cultural studies." --Journal of Illinois History

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 232 pages
• Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr (June 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807132330
• ISBN-13: 978-0807132333
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,241,748 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Dr Thomas Ruys Smith is a Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of Southern Queen: New Orleans in the Nineteenth Century (Continuum, 2011), River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi Before Mark Twain (Louisiana State University Press, 2007), editor of Blacklegs, Card Sharps and Confidence Men: Nineteenth-Century Mississippi River Gambling Stories (LSUP, 2010), and co-editor, with Sarah Churchwell, of Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers, from Charlotte Temple to The Da Vinci Code (Continuum, 2012).