Mark Twain and the Romantic Revival

Abstract:Instead of reading Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc as an anomaly within Mark Twain's oeuvre, this article analyzes it within the context of the Romantic Revival, a wave of popular fiction that dominated bestseller lists during the 1890s and 1900s. The features of the novel that critics tend to dismiss—its sentimentalism, apparent acceptance of supernatural events, and so forth—constitute a direct and purposeful engagement with the conventions of romance, in contrast to Twain's more subversive treatment of those conventions elsewhere. This article contends that Personal Recollections Joan of Arc serves as an example of emergent modernism, which results from the dialectical process at work in the historical struggle between realism and romance and from the novel's own attempt to work through the tensions between two modes of fiction. Throughout the novel, Twain exploits and thematizes those tensions, in turn creating greater ambiguity and irony.