Romance of the Holy Land in American Travel Writing, 1790–1876

Professor Brian Yothers is from the Department of English at The University of Texas, El Paso, USA.

• Contents: The emergence of the Levant in American literature: Barbary captivity narratives, oriental romances, and the Holy Land as Protestant trope; 'The all-perfect text': the skeptical piety of Protestant pilgrims to the Holy Land; Alternative orthodoxies: Clorinda Minor, Orson Hyde, Warder Cresson, and William Henry Odenheimer; 'Such poetic illusions': the skeptical oriental romance of John Lloyd Stephens, Bayard Taylor, George William Curtis, and William Cullen Bryant; Quotidian pilgrimages: Mark Twain, J. Ross Browne, John William DeForest, and David Dorr in Palestine; 'As seen through one's tears': the 'double mystery' of place in Herman Melville's Clarel; Bibliography; Index.

'Yothers makes a significant contribution not only to our understanding of US travel writing in the region, but also to our understanding of the complicated and conflicted relationship of the United States and the Middle East. Yothers's method is to examine a wide-ranging variety of writings that include missionary journals, chronicles of religious pilgrimages, and literary travel narratives.' Studies in Travel Writing