American Palestine

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 naivet 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.

ISBN 0691009732   Pages 320 ISBN13 9780691009735 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher The University Press Group Ltd   Weight (grammes) 485 Imprint Princeton University Press   Published in New Jersey Format Paperback   Height (mm) 229 Publication date 25 Oct 1999   Width (mm) 152 Library of Congress 99020728   Spine width (mm) 18 DEWEY 810.9325694   Academic level Professional / Scholarly, Tertiary education DEWEY edition DC21

		Preface: Manias and Materialities
		Acknowledgments
Pt. 1		Excavating American Palestine
Ch. 1		Holy Lands and Settler Identities		3
Ch. 2		George Sandys: "Double Travels" and Colonial Encounters		14
Ch. 3		"Christianography" and Covenant		24
Ch. 4		Reading and Writing Sacred Geography		39
Pt. 2		"The Fatal Embrace of the Deity": Herman Melville's Pilgrimage to Failure in Clarel
Ch. 5		"A Profound Remove": Annihilation and Covenant		63
Ch. 6		"That Strange Pervert": The Puritan Zionist		84
Ch. 7		"The Great Jewish Counterfeit Detector": Warder Cresson, "Carnal" Hermeneutics, and Zion's Body		114
Ch. 8		Ungar "His Way Eccentric": The Confederate Cherokee's Map of Palestine		138
Pt. 3		The Guilties Abroad: Mark Twain's Comic Appropriation of the Holy Land in Innocents Abroad
Ch. 9		Authority and Authenticity		161
Ch. 10		The Jaffa Colonists and Other Failures		177
Ch. 11		"A White Man So Nervous and Uncomfortable and Savage"		190
Ch. 12		"Rejected Gospels": The Boyhood of Jesus		198
Ch. 13		Reverence and Race		216
Ch. 14		The "Cultivated Negro" and the Curse of Ham		227
Ch. 15		Desolating Narrations: Tom Sawyer's Crusade		248
Ch. 16		Desolating Narrations: "Der Jude Mark Twain"		262
		Notes		275
		Index		311

American Palestine is an incisive, well-informed, and consistently engaging book. -- Robert Milder, Nineteenth-Century Literature

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