American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania
320American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania
320Paperback(New Edition)
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Overview
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: | 9780691009735 |
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Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
Publication date: | 11/14/1999 |
Edition description: | New Edition |
Pages: | 320 |
Product dimensions: | 7.75(w) x 10.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
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
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.
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.
"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