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

by Hilton Obenzinger

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 Herman Melville's A Poem and Pilgrimage to the Holy Land (1876) and Mark Twain's The Innocents 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.

Genres: Academia, History

333 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author was my professor for a couple classes. He found it very upsetting that I wore flip flops in all weather conditions. He tried in a very fatherly way to get me to wear socks. Very, very decent guy. Also, he had Hal Holbrook come in and do his Twain thing. It was awesome.

The thing about Hilton is that he seems so nice and professorly that you kind of forget he's a freaking genius. The book is super interesting.