His latest book, Deep Water: The Mississippi River in the Age of Mark Twain (Louisiana State University Press, 2019), is a pioneering account of Twain's intimate and long-lasting creative engagement with the Mississippi which also details the thriving cultural life of the Mississippi in this period and highlights a diverse collection of voices each telling their own story of the river.

His second book, Southern Queen: New Orleans in the Nineteenth Century (Continuum, 2011), was an exploration of the life and culture of one of America's most fascinating cities during a crucible period in its history. Much of his research is focussed around the social and cultural history of the Mississippi River. His first book, River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi Before Mark Twain (Louisiana State University Press, 2007) was an interdisciplinary examination of the different roles played by the Mississippi in antebellum American culture. The introduction that frames the anthology provides a new literary history of Christmas, contextualizing the selections and making clear the links both between them and to the wider trajectory of American literature.Thomas Ruys Smith is an academic and writer who specialises in the study of nineteenth-century America. He is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom and co-editor of the journals Comparative American Studies and New Area Studies. In Christmas Past, Thomas Ruys Smith brings together a diverse range of voices to showcase the many ways in which Christmas was imagined across the nineteenth century, offering images that echo down to the present. From the authors who helped define a national literary culture, to the popular sentimentalists who negotiated Christmas’s position at the center of family life, to the realists who looked to reshape American letters in the wake of the Civil War, and beyond: all varieties of American writers turned to Christmas as an inevitable and potent subject during this deeply formative period in the history of American literature. Now, for the first time, this rich anthology brings together some of the most significant of those seasonal stories to retell a forgotten tale of Christmases past. Restricted to Repository staff only until 31 December 2099.Īs the modern celebration of Christmas took shape across the nineteenth century, American writers gave it new meaning in the pages of countless books and magazines.

PDF (Thomas Ruys Smith - Christmas Past, Full Draft - LSUP - December 2020) Christmas Past: An Anthology of Seasonal Stories from Nineteenth Century America.

Christmas Past by Thomas Ruys Smith