Combining literary and historical insights and attention to the context of other American writings about Palestine, this book throws light on the construction of American identity in the nineteenth century.

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.

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