American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania

Voorkant
Princeton University Press, 14 nov 1999 - 316 pagina's

In the nineteenth century, American tourists, scholars, evangelists, writers, and artists flocked to Palestine as part of a "Holy Land mania." Many saw America as a New Israel, a modern nation chosen to do God's work on Earth, and produced a rich variety of inspirational art and literature about their travels in the original promised land, which was then part of Ottoman-controlled Palestine. In American Palestine, Hilton Obenzinger explores two "infidel texts" in this tradition: Herman Melville's Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage to the Holy Land (1876) and Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad: or, The New Pilgrims' Progress (1869). As he shows, these works undermined in very different ways conventional assumptions about America's divine mission.


In the darkly philosophical Clarel, Melville found echoes of Palestine's apparent desolation and ruin in his own spiritual doubts and in America's materialism and corruption. Twain's satiric travelogue, by contrast, mocked the romantic naiveté of Americans abroad, noting the incongruity of a "fantastic mob" of "Yanks" in the Holy Land and contrasting their exalted notions of Palestine with its prosaic reality. Obenzinger demonstrates, however, that Melville and Twain nevertheless shared many colonialist and orientalist assumptions of the day, revealed most clearly in their ideas about Arabs, Jews, and Native Americans.


Combining keen literary and historical insights and careful attention to the context of other American writings about Palestine, this book throws new light on the construction of American identity in the nineteenth century.

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Geselecteerde pagina's

Inhoudsopgave

Holy Lands and Settler Identities
3
George Sandys Double Travels and Colonial Encounters
14
Christianography and Covenant
24
Reading and Writing Sacred Geography
39
A Profound Remove Annihilation and Covenant
63
That Strange Pervert The Puritan Zionist
84
The Great Jewish Counterfeit Detector Warder Cresson Carnal Hermeneutics and Zions Body
114
Ungar His Way Eccentric The Confederate Cherokees Map of Palestine
138
A White Man So Nervous and Uncomfortable and Savage
190
Rejected Gospels The Boyhood of Jesus
198
Reverence and Race
216
The Cultivated Negro and the Curse of Ham
227
Desolating Narrations Tom Sawyers Crusade
248
Desolating Narrations Der Jude Mark Twain
262
Notes
275
Index
311

Authority and Authenticity
161
The Jaffa Colonists and Other Failures
177

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Over de auteur (1999)

Hilton Obenzinger is a critic, novelist, and poet. Winner of the American Book Award, his previous works include New York on Fire and Cannibal Eliot and the Lost Histories of San Francisco. He teaches American literature and writing at Stanford University.

Bibliografische gegevens