American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land

"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

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.