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| "Where the weird things are" |
Must Read breathes new life into the study of best-sellers, rescuing them from not only the enormous condescension of posterity but also from the flattering but often reductive readings of modern academics. With its artful blend of textual analysis, historicization, and theoretical speculation, the contributors challenge us to reread and rethink a host of works, ranging from short stories and sentimental novellas to advice manuals and modern blockbusters. For anyone with an interest in the contours of American print culture from the eighteenth century to the present, Must Read is itself a must read work.The second comes from Lisa Botshon, co-editor of the essential Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920s:
This pathbreaking collection provides a unique contribution to the study of American literature, bringing to the fore a broad survey of popular literature from a variety of eras and genres, and bringing to our attention a number of previously neglected yet essential bestselling works. A valuable addition to literary and cultural studies, Must Read is a must read for students and scholars of American popular culture and American literature more generally.More updates soon.
"Although the past two decades have seen a sizeable increase in scholarly interest in bestsellers in the American context, there remains a great deal of unexplored territory when it comes to such literature. Must Read goes a long way in addressing this deficiency by examining a tremendous range of such literature with great critical care, insight, and theoretical sophistication. Must Read is a must read for anyone interested in American bestsellers."
Thomas Ruys Smith’s new book on the social and cultural milieu of nineteenth century New Orleans [...] [is] a richly documented and vivid history that invokes the individuality, the otherness, of a city that is at once familiar and strangely foreign, beguiling yet daunting, for both tourists and residents alike.
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Using an eclectic blend of contemporary travel accounts and letters [...] Smith evokes an intriguing portrait of a vivacious, cosmopolitan nineteenth century American city, a city unlike any other.
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Southern Queen is an engaging, lively and accessible narrative [...] In engaging with the costs of memory Smith’s New Orleans is embroiled in a conversation with the past, with the dead who reside in its memory, and with those mythical figures, places and spaces, that continue to have such resonance in the national and international consciousness.You can read other reviews of Southern Queen here.
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| (Ralph Keeler, via) |
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| (via NYPL) |
"Although New Orleans' early colonial and more recent years are well documented, Ruys Smith's book is one of only a handful of 19th-century chronicles. It covers the key events and phenomena that gave the city such resonance in the global imagination [...] When so much hagiographic and melodramatic cultural production ("literary treacle", in the geographer Peirce F. Lewis' words) has been poured over New Orleans, Ruys Smith deserves credit for this clear-sighted and judicious survey of its most complex and fascinating century."You can read the full review here.
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| History Today, August 2011 |
My travel guide to New Orleans in 1858 is out today in this month's BBC History Magazine (June 2011). This was a fun piece to write, not least because it threw up some interesting research questions. Much of the material I had to hand because of Southern Queen, but it also caused me to have to think about some peculiar specifics.
The Mississippi River: Recent flooding has prompted some speculation that pervasive crop destruction is sure to follow, resulting in the widespread famine that's scheduled to help usher in the Apocalypse.In their own way, these kind of pronouncements fit into a significant American tradition. There is a long history of prophesying Armageddon, particularly along or in relation to the Mississippi. Indeed, the current interest in the possibility of imminent rapture is as nothing compared to events in the nineteenth century, as the example of William Miller attests.
"Thomas Ruys Smith vividly connects his readers to an important time in the explosive peopling of our nation [...] which taken together is like the relearning of a favourite story or song long forgotten [...] What we know in more modern terms as our "strong, brown god" has a rich, important history and myth hardly known. It is a river flowing with archetypes. Perhaps it is not possible for us to see the river with the same eyes as those who once strove against its strength and unpredictability to be sustained by its life. But those people saw their dreams reflected in the Mississippi, and this accounting gives a proper perspective so that readers today, sitting on its banks, may see themselves more clearly."
