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.
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