Travel in “climes devout”: The romance of the Holy Land in American writing, 1790–1876

Brian Duane Yothers, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation explores the development of a vigorous and diverse subgenre in nineteenth-century American travel writing, that of the Holy Land travel narrative. I seek to delineate the contours of American discourse about the Holy Land during the nineteenth century by examining missionary accounts, captivity narratives, narratives of religious pilgrimages to Palestine, travel narratives in the genteel tradition, satirical counternarratives such as those by Mark Twain, John William De Forest and J. Ross Browne, and, finally, Herman Melville's polyphonic treatment of the sacred landscape in his often neglected long poem Clarel. American travel writing about the Holy Land forms a coherent, if greatly varied, tradition, a tradition that is marked by a profound intertextuality with the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, British and continental travel narratives about the Holy Land, and the treatments of the Holy Land authored by other Americans. Chapter 1 develops the background for the Holy Land narratives in terms of the larger American discourse about the Middle East with particular emphasis on the genre of Barbary captivity narratives that achieved popularity in the 1790s. These narratives and fictional works provide a framework for American discussions of the Middle East that informs the development of the Holy Land genre, particularly in its ethnographic and intercultural aspects. Chapter 2 examines the travel narratives to the Holy Land composed by the pious travelers Edward Robinson, William M. Thomson, Clorinda Minor, and William C. Prime. Chapter 3 explores the more obviously skeptical and self-consciously literary narratives of John Lloyd Stephens, Bayard Taylor, George William Curtis, William Cullen Bryant, and David Dorr. Chapter 4 explores the satirical accounts of pilgrimage authored by the most iconoclastic of American travelers to the Holy Land: John W. De Forest, J. Ross Browne, and Mark Twain. Chapter 5 consists of an extended close reading of Melville's long poem Clarel, which represents the culmination of the tradition of nineteenth-century American writing about the Holy Land because it gives voice explicitly to the full range of religious, political, and epistemological questions raised by the other texts.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Thompson, Purdue University.

Subject Area

American literature

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