Recognition and despair: Mark Twain's The personal recollections of Joan of Arc as a modern literary allegory in the American tradition.

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to explicate Mark Twain's The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc in terms of modern, American, literary allegory and thereby demonstrate that this work, until now dismissed by the critics as a poor example of Twain's art, is significant to his canon of fiction and to American literature, generally. Such a purpose necessitates the careful re-evaluation and redefinition of allegory as a modern literary genre, and the reassessment of its role in early American literature and in Twain's major works.