Praiseworthy and complete scholarship make this the definitive work on the subject.

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 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.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1881.

The acclaimed author of García Márquez delivers “a compulsively readable account of the life and works of our greatest . . . writer of fantasy” (New York Daily News). Since its first publication in 1981, Borges and His Fiction has introduced the life and works of this Argentinian master-writer to an entire generation of students, high school and college teachers, and general readers. Responding to a steady demand for an updated edition, Gene H. Bell-Villada has significantly revised and expanded the book to incorporate new information that has become available since Borges’ death in 1986. In particular, he offers a more complete look at Borges and Peronism and Borges’ personal experiences of love and mysticism, as well as revised interpretations of some of Borges’ stories. As before, the book is divided into three sections that examine Borges’ life, his stories in Ficciones and El Aleph, and his place in world literature. “Of the scores of Borges studies by now published in English, Bell-Villada’s excellent book stands out as one of the freshest and most generally helpful . . . Lay readers and specialists alike will find his book a valuable and highly readable companion to Ficciones and El Aleph.” —Choice