Description
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
About the Author
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.
Reviews
"American Palestine is an incisive, well-informed, and consistently engaging book."--Robert Milder, Nineteenth-Century Literature
Book Information
ISBN 9780691009735
Author Hilton Obenzinger
Format Paperback
Page Count 320
Imprint Princeton University Press
Publisher Princeton University Press
Weight(grams) 454g