Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
Personal recollections of Joan of Arc (Original: Personal Recollections on Joan of Arc ) is a historical novel by the American writer Mark Twain. He was first published in 1895 in Harper 's Magazine and appeared in 1896 in book form. It is an unusual text for Twain. Nevertheless, he kept this novel for his best work, which is probably due to the here he created ideal of pure Virgin of Jeanne d' Arc ( the embodied his own wife for him). Its here laid down romantic - tragic view of the world can be explained also with his personal situation at the time: his favorite daughter Susy had died unexpectedly.
Among the many edits that of Joan of Arc- substance has been found in the literature, the Mark Twain is not only chronologically between Friedrich Schiller ( 1801) and George Bernard Shaw ( 1923); with its attempt to combine serious historiography and romantic - tragic view of the world with burlesque elements are the Recollections and literary history between these two outstanding designs of the topic.
In contrast to the, usual ' satirist is Twain was made here in a very romantic, long-winded, sentimental and pathetic effusions ( "She was perhaps the only selfless man, whose name in the secular history has a place ," Preface ), which induced him also not to publish the work under his usual pseudonym "Mark Twain ". He placed his heroine in its world-historical significance directly behind Christ. Of his three historical novels - in addition to this work, The Prince and the Pauper in 1861 and A Connecticut Yankee at the court of King Arthur 1889 - this is indeed the most ambitious, the least satirical and therefore also the least successful.
To make these " memories " appear as objectively historical, Mark Twain has two (fictitious ) invented "authorities": the pages and Secretary Sieur Louis de Conte ( " freely translated from French into modern English old-fashioned " ), allegedly in the same village grew, and the translator Jean François Alden, the more comments in footnotes to the recollections Contes contributes from the perspective of the 19th century. Conte wrote his memoirs at the age of 82 years do not happen to just supposedly in 1492, the year of the discovery of America, and dedicated them to his Ururgroßneffen and nieces.
Mark Twain has actually studied in detail the sources available to literature and compiled into a pseudo-scientific apparatus; the biographical facts from the life of Joan of Arc and the course of history are largely authentic. Some inserted fictional characters ( Conte, Rainguesson, the paladin ) and some clearly fictional episodes can occasionally recognize the 'old' Mark Twain, but usually disappears behind the mass of historical material; occasional interpretations and Comments historical events ( from the pen of the fictitious Conte) loosen the Recollections on.