American Palestine
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€55.99
A01=Hilton Obenzinger
Abolitionism
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Allegory
Allusion
Americans
Arabs
Author_Hilton Obenzinger
Bayard Taylor
Bedouin
Category=DSBF
Category=DSK
Category=JPH
Christian Zionism
Christianity
Church of the Holy Sepulchre
Clarel
Colonialism
Colonization
Curse of Ham
Disgust
Edward Said
Edward Wilmot Blyden
Enthusiasm
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eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Erudition
Exploration
Hebrews
Hermeneutics
Indigenous peoples
Irony
Jeremiad
Jews
John Lloyd Stephens
Judaism
Judea
Liberia
Literature
Manifest destiny
Mark Twain
Missionary
Monomania
Mortmain
Narrative
New Israel
Newspaper
Notion (ancient city)
Orientalism
Orson Hyde
Ottoman Empire
Parody
Persecution
Poetry
Protestantism
Puritans
Racism
Religion
Religious text
Rhetoric
Ridicule
Satire
Sensibility
Skepticism
Slavery
Suggestion
Superiority (short story)
The Innocents Abroad
The Various
Typee
Uncertainty
Wandering Jew
West Africa
Western culture
White supremacy
Writing
Zionism
Product details
- ISBN 9780691009735
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 197 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 14 Nov 1999
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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 naivete 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.
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.
