BAAS Annual Conference, University of Nottingham, April 16-19, 2009
Conference Abstracts
Thomas Ruys Smith University of East Anglia
"The Mississippi was a virgin field": Mark Twain and Postbellum River Writings, 1865-1876.
Interviewed during his 1895-6 lecture tour about his role as the "prophet of the Mississippi", Mark Twain did not hesitate to assert his imaginative copyright to the river: "I was the only one who wrote about old times on the Mississippi. Wherever else I have been some better have been there before and will come after, but the Mississippi was a virgin field." Although there has been some attention paid to the importance of antebellum river writings in the development of Twain's conception of the Mississippi (not least by Twain himself, in Life on the Mississippi (1883)), he has largely been taken at his word in his claim to the discovery of the river as a "virgin field" in postbellum America. But such an assertion is in need of interrogation. In ways that have not been previously acknowledged, the Mississippi was far from untouched as a post-war literary subject. It was, in fact, the focus of a variety of significant postbellum accounts - many of which Twain himself was undoubtedly aware of before he published the first of his major river writings in 1876. This paper, then, will begin the task of reconstructing the context in which Twain came to write about the river, examining the work of the wide variety of writers who engaged with the Mississippi in the early postbellum period, and exploring their diverse connections to Twain and his work.