DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon

Elizabeth Fenton editor Jared Hickman editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc

Published:8th Oct '19

Should be back in stock very soon

This paperback is available in another edition too:

Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon cover

As the sacred text of a modern religious movement of global reach, The Book of Mormon has undeniable historical significance. That significance, this volume shows, is inextricable from the intricacy of its literary form and the audacity of its historical vision. This landmark collection brings together a diverse range of scholars in American literary studies and related fields to definitively establish The Book of Mormon as an indispensable object of Americanist inquiry not least because it is, among other things, a form of Americanist inquiry in its own right--a creative, critical reading of "America." Drawing on formalist criticism, literary and cultural theory, book history, religious studies, and even anthropological field work, Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon captures as never before the full dimensions and resonances of this "American Bible."

This volume of essays succeeds in demonstrating to secular scholars that the Book of Mormon is a supremely valuable object with which to study many of the central themes of nineteenth-century American life. But it also succeeds and showing faithful, but perhaps bored, Latter-day Saints that there is much more to the Book of Mormon than meets the Sunday school eye. * Zachary Davis, The Journal of Mormon History *
...there is little denying the importance of the larger impression that each essay leaves when read as part of an interlocking whole. Upon completion the reader should leave fully convinced that the record that Smith claimed to unearth yet has many things to reveal regarding its own complexity as a literary text, as well as insights into the culture of 19th-century America. * Spencer Wells, Southern Utah University, Reading Religion *

ISBN: 9780190221935

Dimensions: 155mm x 231mm x 28mm

Weight: 635g

456 pages