River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi before Mark Twain (Southern Literary Studies) - Hardcover

Smith, Thomas Ruys

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807132330 ISBN 13: 9780807132333

Publisher: LSU Press, 2007

Synopsis

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 antebellum imagination, exploring its cultural position in 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 that evolved 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. He examines the accounts of European travelers, including Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray, whose views of the river were heavily influenced by the world of the steamboat and plantation slavery.
Smith discusses the growing importance of visual representations of the Mississippi as the antebellum period progressed, 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 Confidence-Man. 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 post-war 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.

About this title

About the Author

Thomas Ruys Smith is a lecturer in American literature and culture at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom.

Reviews

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
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807132330
• ISBN 13: 9780807132333
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256