| It seems that historical figures and detailed facts are simply irrelevant to extraordinary adventures and supernatural elements. However, quite a few of Mark Twain's novels are characterized by the integration of historical truth and wild imagination. As a matter of fact, many characters in the Twain canon are real not only in art but also in life since they are historical or legendary figures or creations based on people in real life; meanwhile, Twain's works are also rich in romantic elements:the nostalgia tinged with idyll and idealism and the seeming Holy Grail adventurous quest, the identity dislocation due to clothing exchange and the timely help of a mystic knight-errant, the quasi time-travel story and the displaced Prometheus myth, and supernatural signs in the form of miraculous visions, divine revelations and innate abilities as well.In the history of American literature, Mark Twain is often referred to as "a humorist of the wild west" and "a mirror of America" as if romanticism had never occurred to him. Besides, critical interest in Twain's oeuvre is often focused on themes, characters and writing styles rather than cross-genre features. In this connection, this dissertation, applying theories on biography and romance in the perspective of comparative studies, aims to explore the biographic and romantic features in such novels as Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, etc. Through close reading of relevant works and biographic studies of the author, this dissertation is intended to reveal how Mark Twain ingeniously blends facts and fancy so as to present a comparatively real image of Mark Twain who is eager to and good at crossing boundaries, and hereby to remove various stereotypes concerning him.This dissertation is divided into five chapters, with the first as the introduction and the last to he afterthought. The three middle chapters respectively revolve around the origin and influence of Mark Twain's unique writing devices and the comparison between Mark Twain's medieval romances and the marvel tales of the Tang Dynasty in China.In the first chapter, Section One briefly introduces the artistic charm of Mark Twain's works, namely the national and cosmopolitan qualities in content, the comprehensiveness in subjects, the originality in style and the rebellion against literary norms. Section Two provides three reasons for this writing. Firstly, features of biography and romance coexist in Twain's works. Secondly, the cross-genre features have long been overlooked by critics. Last but not least, Mark Twain has long been classified as a typical writer of realism and a pioneer against romanticism. The third section contains definitions of such terms as genre, biography, autobiography, journal, memoir, romance, legend, myth, folklore, etc., with special attention paid to Northrop Frye's theory on romance and the two pronunciations of the Chinese character zhuan and their different meanings. The fourth section is a summary of academic research related to this thesis, mainly focusing on the various versions of Mark Twain's autobiography, Twain's views of Europe and history, and the relationship between Twain's career and women.The second chapter is concerned with the causes of the cross-genre features in Mark Twain's fiction. There are three reasons for Twain's obsession with extraordinary adventures of real people. The first is the impact of environment. Twain became defiant due to the influence of his parents and the Mississippi River. Extensive reading of European romantic works brought him a fascination with adventurous quests, exotic places in antiquity, exaggerated farce, horror elements, twin modes and chivalry. Twain alternated between admiration and loathing for Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, but he remained respectful to Samuel Taylor Coleridge all his life. Besides, Twain had mixed feelings about the antiquity, which helped to shape his aesthetic conceptions and his view of history. A case in point is the weakened but not negative image of King Arthur, which reveals Twain's complex about the Middle Ages. However the medieval historical narratives and romance simply appeal to him. The third influence is from the Bible, which provides Twain with inexhaustible sources for contemplating humanity. The Bible, though mainly a religious scripture, is also a masterpiece of history and myths. From biographic point of view, the Old Testament can be seen as the ethnic biography of Israelites, and the New Testament as the biography of Jesus Christ and his apostles. Meanwhile, the Bible can also be viewed as a collection of myths and legends. The narrative device of intermingling truth and imagination offers Twain a model for writing. For instance, Twain's legendary heroine Joan of Arc is a Christ-like figure.The third chapter is about the influence of Mark Twain's cross-genre writing on American fiction. With their own views of history, cultural awareness and peculiar imagination, the African American writer Toni Morrison and the Chinese American writer Maxine Hong Kingston, breaking genre boundary, have created works of biographic truth and legendary fantasy. By reconstructing the story of a black Kentucky slave Margaret Ghana, Morrison's Beloved shows biographic features not merely of one person but the enslaved African Americans as an ethnic group. Meanwhile, the novel is a romance with supernatural color. Due to the employment of magical elements, it is hard to tell the world of reality from that of ghosts. By representing ghosts and ships of desolate slaves, the novel is filled with Gothic horror and mystery. The tension created via irony, paradox and ambiguity contributes to the intertwining of life and death and the past and the present, producing a mystical effect on the identity of the Beloved. Moreover, the time-and-space inversion in narration and the mythical journey of the heroine render the work all the more weird. In short, Beloved is a masterpiece with biographic and legendary features. In the similar line, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior is a fantastic autobiography. Exhibiting the author and her relatives' life and the narrator's reflections on the characters and events in the work, the novel blends historical facts, digested facts and psychological facts. In the autobiography and separate biographies, the author has examined her gender and ethnic consciousness, and found her multiple selfs hidden in other characters. The Woman Warrior is also legendary. The exorcism story of the mother lends the novel a color of comedy, farce and Gothic terror while the constantly changing fairies of an old couple and the modified versions of Fa Mulan and Cai Yan render the semi-documentary work fantastic. It is through biographic truth that the author has confirmed her own identity, and through family legends and Chinese folktales that she has accomplished the interpretation and reconstruction of the self. What is worth noting is that both Morrison and Kingston claimed that Mark Twain was their favorite writer. Therefore, the research on the influence is not far-fetched.In Chapter Four, the thesis discusses the similarities and differences between Mark Twain's medieval romances and the Chinese Tang tales. Both Twain's medieval romances and the Chinese Tang tales are characterized by historical truth and fantastic imagination. Also, they both address contemporary issues with didactic purposes. Taking classical writings as aesthetic models, the Tang tales extol virtues and condemn vices. Similarly, Mark Twain's three medieval romances display insightful historical consciousness. Through The Prince and the Pauper, Twain expresses his notion of class, that is, social stratification and class difference are not contingent upon a person's birth, and the legitimacy of the throne and the mercy of the monarch are of paramount importance. One of the reasons that Twain vilifies King Arthur's court is to castigate the19th century America, which breeds the corruptive Southern chivalric culture, the slavery system, and enslavement at large. Through Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, Twain builds a bridge between history and reality. As a firm patriot, a devout Christian, an adolescent and an ideal woman, Twain's image of Joan is a projection of various thoughts in the American Gilded Age. In short, Twain's medieval romances have reference to both the past and the present. The most obvious differences between Twain's romances and Tang tales lie in external textual forms and internal narrative patterns. Tang tales are usually short but Twain's romances are extremely long. Though short in length, Tang tales possess the characteristics of history, poetry and commentary. In structure and narration, they demonstrate biographic features inherited from historical writings. Besides, poetry and parallel prose abound in them. Apart from rhyming verses, the poetical quality is mostly displayed through flowering words, subtle ideas, strong emotions and profound artistic flavor. Another characteristic of the narrative pattern of Tang tales is the rear commentary. By imitating the commentary pattern of historical biographies, Tang tale writers articulate their value judgments. Although both Tang tales and Twain's medieval romances aim at fantasy, the essences of their narratives are far different. Disregarding orientations to reality or fantasy, bizarre and weird elements run throughout Tang tales no matter whether they concern miracles or love or anecdotes or chivalric deeds for they are derived from mystery tales in the Six Dynasties and influenced by China's witchcraft culture, Buddhist karma and Taoist notion of immortality. Twain's medieval romances, on the other hand, present extraordinary adventures through semi-fairytale identity mistake, quasi science-fiction time travel and Christian mysticism.The last part of this thesis is the conclusion. On the basis of analyzing Mark Twain's training theory, the first section discusses his genius theory and other pneumatologic tendencies, which are opposite to his empirical point of view. Mark Twain spends his life vacillating between rationalism and irrationalism. Works like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Prince and the Pauper show the author's belief in the impact of training or environment on character formation, but Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc reveals his genius theory and the tendency towards Christian mysticism. The author contributes Joan's extraordinary experiences to divine revelation, and he is convinced that Joan's abilities are innate gifts rather than the products of training or environment. At this point, it seems that Twain has abandoned the much valued scientific training theory. Twain's pneumatologic tendencies can be explained in three aspects. First, though Twain seemingly despises orthodox religion, it doesn't mean that he is an atheist or a rival of Christianity; rather, the lack of faith in American society and his personal misfortune narrow the gap between him and deities. Besides, Twain admires people who are pious to religion, such as Joan of Arc, Martin Luther, his mother and his wife. Furthermore, during his whole life Twain is interested in mysteries, such as retribution, omen and telepathy. It is out of the drive for primitivism that Twain leads Huck to choose between good and evil under the guidance of a sound heart and enables Joan to accomplish extraordinary achievements with the help of God and intuition. The second section of this part, based on the writer's life and works, analyzes Mark Twain's effect theory in the light of performance. From a public speaker to a professional writer, Twain is attracted to performance and its effect; and lots of characters in his works, just like their creator, are both actors and directors. It is Twain's nature that makes him love performance so much. To him, dullness and boredom are the biggest enemies in life and being neglected or forgotten is pitiable; therefore Twain and his characters try hard to achieve ideal effects. Twain pursues effects not only for commercial and social benefits but also for spiritual satisfaction and aesthetic enjoyment. The last section concludes this thesis. In more than70years, Mark Twain has experienced numerous crosses in geography, occupations and social status; his view of history shifts between the progressive and the cyclical; his writing style varies between solemnity and burlesque; and his characters cross the boundaries of class, social status, race, time and space, and gender.Biography aims for reality and romance for fantasy. It seems that they have nothing in common in genre. However, with wild imagination, Mark Twain has mingled real historical figures with extraordinary stories and thus most explicitly voiced his anti-realist concern in the late19th century trend of realism. |
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