Culture, Counter-culture, and the Subversion of the Comic in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Abstract

Theoretical particular purpose interest in in the the comic-parodic relationship between novel, as literature a form in and which society a recurrent is invested oscillation with Theoretical pa ticular purpose in the comic-parodic novel, s a form in which a ecurren o cillation of genres and narrative perspectives occurs only within a hierarchy where positioning is relational and perpetually contested, and where apparently common languages and values are revisited throughout the course of the novel.1 The Middle Ages, as Umberto Eco reminds us, is a popular site of ironic revisitation for the comic-parodic novelist, providing the opportunity to speculate about our infancy, of course, but also about the illusion of our senility (69). 2 As Eco goes on to point out, however, writers such as Ariosto and Cervantes do not revisit the Middle Ages as antiquarians but rather as purveyors of a period already refashioned by the romance tradition. To this company he might have added Mark Twain, who has been described by more than one critic as the Cervantes.3 The sixth century Middle Ages to which Twain sends Hank Morgan, his nineteenth-century middle class American hero in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, is in fact the fictive Middle Ages of Malory-the highly unreal and literary world of the idealistic, anachronistic romance(Kordecki 338), itself a fifteenth-century revisitation of the real sixth century. Responding to this romance/realism problematic, critical reactions to A Connecticut Yankee have generally fallen into one of two mutually exclusive schools: the first sees the novel as a farewell to the romance in American letters, a celebration of the vernacular, and