River of Dreams - Update

Release date for River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi Before Mark Twain has been slated for June 2007. As you can see from the sidebar, it's already available for pre-order on Amazon.com - and numerous other reputable bookstores around the internet.

LSUP has also released its publication list for Spring 2007, which means that River of Dreams now has its own website here.

ISBN: 0-8071-3233-0 cloth
ISBN13: 978-0-8071-3233-3
272 pages, 26 Halftones, 1 Map, 6 x 9

River of Dreams - A First Glimpse

A first glimpse of the cover of River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi Before Mark Twain (Louisiana State University Press, Spring 2007). This is a first draft and subject to change before publication, but it gives a hint of what's to come. The background is a detail from Herzog Friedrich Paul Wilhelm von Württemberg's lithograph, Die Balize an der Mündung des Missisippi (1828-1835).

And to go along with the cover, here's the promotional copy for the book, soon to appear in the LSU Press Spring 2007 catalogue:

River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi before Mark Twain
Thomas Ruys Smith

The Mississippi River’s cultural role in antebellum America

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 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.

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

Big Muddy 6.1

My review of Jay Feldman's When The Mississippi Ran Backwards is about to appear in issue 6.1 of Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley. It's a smart looking publication mostly devoted to new fiction and poetry.

Revue Française d'Études Américaines

Margaret Hall, Frances Trollope, Harriet Martineau

My article, ''The river now began to bear on our imaginations': Margaret Hall, Frances Trollope, Harriet Martineau and the Problem of the Antebellum Mississippi', is available for sale and download here and here. The special issue of the Revue Française d'Études Américaines dedicated to the Mississippi is available from Amazon France.


Update: Full text PDF available for free here.

Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing

'The Shanty-Boat' (from Willard Glazier's Down the Great River, 1887)

The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing - featuring my chapter on the Mississippi: 'The Essence of America: The Mississippi River as Site and Symbol' - now has its own websites on the Cambridge University Press website:

Hardback; Paperback

More information as it emerges.

Next Year's Courses: The Civil War and The South

Admiral Porter's Fleet Running the Rebel Blockade of the Mississippi at Vicksburg, April 16th 1863 (Currier & Ives)

Course outlines for two units that I will be convening at the University of East Anglia next year:

Nineteenth Century Representations of the Civil War:
The Civil War defined the American Nineteenth Century, and yet it has often been asserted that it was an 'unwritten war'. This unit will refute such claims, and examine the diverse ways that the conflict found expression throughout the nineteenth century, from Harriet Beecher's Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851-2) – in Lincoln's words, 'the book that started this great war' – to the publication of Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage in 1895. We will encounter a rich variety of representations – documentary photography, journalism, letters and diaries, memoirs, poetry, song, popular fiction, children's literature, short stories and novels – and consider throughout what the changing nature of the imagined Civil War has to tell us about America.

(Update: full course outline available here.)

Nineteenth Century Literature of the American South:
This unit will explore the transformation of Southern literature in the nineteenth century and, in so doing, will examine the changing nature of the South itself. In the first half of the course, we will witness the emergence of a distinct Southern literary identity in the years before the Civil War, and particularly consider the effect of slavery on the development of Southern letters. In the latter half, we will encounter, through Reconstruction and beyond, the effects of defeat, liberation and memory, and their concomitant, contradictory expression in the diverse literary modes of poetry, plantation fiction, local colour and realism.

(Update: full course outline available here.)

University of East Anglia

From September I will be a Lecturer in American Studies (Literature and Culture) at the University of East Anglia. Contact details and links to my courses to follow. For now, more information about the School of American Studies is available here.

Update: My UEA profile is now available to view here.

New Statesman - 'Mardi Gras Among the Ruins'

Invitation to the Mistick Krewe of Comus' Ball, 1925

My article on this year's Mardi Gras celebrations in New Orleans has been published in the New Statesman. Here's the first paragraph:

'Mardi Gras Among the Ruins'

'Not for the first time in its history, New Orleans is being held together by glitter and glue. Much of the city is still in ruins, and rebuilding plans are being vehemently debated, but Mardi Gras festivities are proceeding as normally as they can - normally, that is, for New Orleans...'

University College London

This term I will be working as a Temporary Lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature University College London. Contact details available here.

I'll be teaching a range of courses including my own unit on New Orleans literature. New Orleans: Before the Deluge, will cover Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces, Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter, and James Lee Burke's Neon Rain.

Mississippi Quarterly - 'Independence Day, 1835'

John Murrell stealing a slave

My article on the literary appearances of outlaw John Murrell and the Vicksburg gambler lynchings is soon to appear in Mississippi Quarterly. A preview of the first two paragraphs:

'Independence Day, 1835: The John A. Murrell Conspiracy and the Lynching of the Vicksburg Gamblers in Literature.'

'1835 has long been renowned as an extraordinary year for the Mississippi, not least because November witnessed the birth of one Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Events in the summer had already ensured that Independence Day, 1835 would enjoy a long afterlife in memory. Violence spread along the river. In Madison County, Mississippi, particularly the towns of Beattie’s Bluff and Livingston, paranoid terror gripped the population. It was widely believed that a criminal conspiracy masterminded by the (already incarcerated) John A. Murrell was about to result in a slave rebellion, timed to coincide with the upcoming national holiday. From the end of June to the middle of July, mob violence and vigilante justice held sway, resulting in ‘several dozen’ deaths and lynchings. Itinerant whites – primarily, steam doctors – were hanged alongside suspected slaves. As the Columbus (Miss.) Democratic Press described Murrell’s plot, ‘A more diabolical attempt – a deeper laid scheme of villainy, was never brought to light […] white men […] have, with a fiend like madness, instigated the ignorant and generally contented African, to rise.’

In Vicksburg, tensions between the town and its itinerant community of gamblers were about to ignite. It began with a brawl, at the Fourth of July celebration hosted by the Vicksburg militia between some of its members and a gambler (or a known associate of gamblers), Francis Cabler. After tarring and feathering Cabler, the militia resolved upon the formation of an Anti-Gambling Committee. Gamblers were given twenty-four hours to leave town. After the allotted period of time had passed, the militia and a civilian mob descended upon the ‘Kangaroos’, the infamous waterfront district that took its name from a famous gambling-house that had burned down the year before. Breaking up roulette wheels and faro tables as they went, the militia found a group of individuals ensconced in Alfred North’s coffee house. After an exchange of shots the militia stormed the building. One of its members, Dr Hugh Bodley, was shot dead. Five men – labelled as gamblers – were seized and promptly hanged. Other river towns followed suit, exiling, though not executing, their own gambling communities. The Louisville Advertiser announced that the ‘proceedings at Vicksburg have kindled a spirit throughout the lower country which is breaking forth at every point, and obliging the blackleg fraternity to make their escape with all haste...’

New Statesman - 'Gulf Coast Blues'

A link to my article on the historic parallels for Hurricane Katrina in the New Statesman (12 September, 2005):

'Gulf Coast Blues'

'During the summer months, churches along America's Gulf Coast join together in a prayer that humbly acknowledges their precarious position in the world. It is "A Prayer for Hurricane Season": "We live in the shadow of a danger over which we have no control: the Gulf, like a provoked and angry giant, can awake from its seeming lethargy, overstep its conventional boundaries, invade our land and spread chaos." The destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina may be shocking in its magnitude, but for those who lived in its path, it should be no surprise. The Deep South has long been subject to disasters of biblical proportions. New Orleans alone can list flood, fire, plague and famine in its 300-year history. Parallels for modern horrors are all too easy to find, and natural catastrophes have proved essential for the political, social and cultural development of this unique region of the United States...'

Welcome to Blackleg - About the Author

Canada Bill throwing monte

Blackleg is an occasional record of the publications and research activities of Dr Thomas Ruys Smith, Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the University of East Anglia (Norwich, United Kingdom). Links to electronic versions of my writings, or to information about them, can be found in the sidebar. 

A relatively up-to-date CV can be found here.

Please feel free to contact me about anything on this site or any aspect of my research . Just click on BLACKLEG.