Introduction

In 2016, the France Berkeley Fund granted financial support to "The 'French Marginalia' of Mark Twain's Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1895–96) at Berkeley: Patriotism without Borders." The project brought together a team of senior and junior Twain specialists and researchers on both sides of the Atlantic and culminated at the 2017 Eighth Quadrennial Conference on the state of Mark Twain studies in Elmira, organized by the Center for Mark Twain Studies, with a panel entirely devoted to Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc.

This special issue not only brings the final touches to the project by presenting some of its findings, it also goes beyond and brings Mark Twain's Joan of Arc well into the twenty-first century. When it comes to an author who was so fond of, or intrigued by, twinship, it is worth saying that this ALR special issue has a French sibling. Whereas the articles gathered herein deal exclusively with Mark Twain's historical romance, the French journal of American Studies RFEA will devote its Fall 2019 issue to "Joan of Arc through American Eyes." By focusing on Joan of Arc's looming presence in American literature, art, and culture, it sets Twain's own novel in context. The Elmira workshop on Joan of Arc thus initiated a transatlantic dialogue between scholarly journals.

What would be more appropriate to open this issue than a study providing new insight into the very title of the book? In "What is Personal about Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc," Linda Morris uses archive material, including Twain's correspondence, scrapbooks, and marginalia to reevaluate his relationship over the years to the historic figure, the family involvement in his project, as well as the relationship of his famous narrator Louis de Conte with Joan of Arc. In "Discourses of Faith vs. Fraud in Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc and Christian Science," Jeanne Reesman opposes Joan of Arc's voice as Twain renders it, based on the trial record, to the voice of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, in her Science and Health with Key to the Scripture (1875). In "Whohoo!!! Joan of Arc!!!!!" Susan K. Harris brings Joan of Arc to the age of the Internet and reflects on what online reactions to the novel reveal about it, Twain, and modern readers. Geoffrey Williams in "What Joan of Arc and Mark Twain can Teach us about Human Motivation and Well-Being" uses ground-breaking tools to show how the text anticipates Self-Determination Theory, a general psychological theory of human motivation. Rounding up this special issue is "The Democratic Reconfiguration of History in Mark Twain's Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc" in which Delphine Louis-Dimitrov studies how Mark Twain's broad range of sources shaped the democratic vision of Joan of Arc that inspired the literary politics of the text.

The issue is hoping to highlight the significance and modernity of a text that has long remained in the shadow of the Mark Twain canon. It stands apart from the works that had defined his literary identity. Yet for all its exceptionality, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc turns out to be central to his career and brings together some of his sharpest "personal," literary, and political concerns.