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

by Hilton Obenzinger

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691216324
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/21/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Preface: Manias and Materialities ix

Acknowledgments xix

PART ONE: Excavating American Palestine

Chapter One Holy Lands and Settler Identities 3

Chapter Two George Sandys: "Double Travels" and Colonial Encounters 14

Chapter Three "Christianography" and Covenant 24

Chapter Four Reading and Writing Sacred Geography 39

PART Two: "The Fatal Embrace of the Deity": Herman Melville's Pilgrimage to Failure in Clarel

Chapter Five "A Profound Remove": Annihilation and Covenant 63

Chapter Six "That Strange Pervert": The Puritan Zionist 84

Chapter Seven "The Great Jewish Counterfeit Detector": Warder Cresson, "Carnal" Hermeneutics, and Zion's Body 114

Chapter Eight Ungar "His Way Eccentric": The Confederate Cherokee's Map of Palestine 138

PART THREE: The Guilties Abroad: Mark Twain's Comic Appropriation of the Holy Land in Innocents Abroad

Chapter Nine Authority and Authenticity 161

Chapter Ten The Jaffa Colonists and Other Failures 177

Chapter Eleven "A White Man So Nervous and Uncomfortable and Savage" 190

Chapter Twelve "Rejected Gospels": The Boyhood of Jesus 198

Chapter Thirteen Reverence and Race 216

Chapter Fourteen The "Cultivated Negro" and the Curse of Ham 227

Chapter Fifteen Desolating Narrations: Tom Sawyer's Crusade 248

Chapter Sixteen Desolating Narrations: "Der Jude Mark Twain" 262

Notes 275

Index 311

What People are Saying About This

Giles Gunn

American Palestine is a study of the way that the cultural obsession with 'Palestine' helped to define America's settler-colonial identity both before and after the Civil War and thus kept alive its own expansionist energies. Obenzinger turns an extraordinarily improbable, not to say problematic, comparison and contrast between Melville and Twain into a splendid examination of the nineteenth-century American metaphysics of Holy Land-loving.
— Giles Gunn, University of California, Santa Barbara

Sacvan Bercovitch

Obenzinger writes with insight, authority, and great thoroughness. And his historical backgrounding is consistently interesting, entertaining, and instructive. American Palestine contains one of the most searching critiques I know of the complexities of dissent in Melville's work. There is no better survey of Americans abroad in the Gilded Age and no sharper analysis of the West-as-metaphor in Twain's work. American Palestine is a distinguished contribution to American literary and cultural studies.
— Sacvan Bercovitch, Charles H. Carswell Professor of English and American Literature, Harvard University

From the Publisher

"Obenzinger writes with insight, authority, and great thoroughness. And his historical backgrounding is consistently interesting, entertaining, and instructive. American Palestine contains one of the most searching critiques I know of the complexities of dissent in Melville's work. There is no better survey of Americans abroad in the Gilded Age and no sharper analysis of the West-as-metaphor in Twain's work. American Palestine is a distinguished contribution to American literary and cultural studies."—Sacvan Bercovitch, Charles H. Carswell Professor of English and American Literature, Harvard University

"American Palestine is a study of the way that the cultural obsession with 'Palestine' helped to define America's settler-colonial identity both before and after the Civil War and thus kept alive its own expansionist energies. Obenzinger turns an extraordinarily improbable, not to say problematic, comparison and contrast between Melville and Twain into a splendid examination of the nineteenth-century American metaphysics of Holy Land-loving."—Giles Gunn, University of California, Santa Barbara

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher

American Palestine is an incisive, well-informed, and consistently engaging book.

Nineteenth-Century Literature - Robert Milder

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

Nineteenth-Century Literature