a) the home literature movement didn’t really go away and we still need an accounting of what it did during the years 1930-1970 and how it influenced the development of the Mormon genre market

b) the faithful realism period designation ignores the genre market (and esp. doesn’t account for the special Mormon genre case of speculative fiction)

c) it places too much emphasis on novels — other creative narrative forms (most especially memoir, short story and film) may have had as much as an influence on the field, certainly short stories as part of the home literature movement and film during the past 8 years.

Somewhere I have an essay about all this. I’ll have to see if I can track it down and adapt it for a post on A Motley Vision.

I won’t try and recreate it, but I’ll mention my point in brief.

VRT writes: “I do hope we see more work done on 20th century Mormon culture, but that’s not an easy area to work on. Pre-assimilationist Mormonism is simply so much more interesting, both to Mormon and non-Mormon scholars, that it will continue to receive the bulk of attention.”

I think this is spot on. Here’s an example:

I think it could be very interesting to look at the development of the Mormon romance novel (beginning with the late 19th century Mormon courtship stories that mirrored a similar stories trend in mainstream America) in comparison to the development of the mainstream American romance novel. I wonder if certain aspects of Mormon theology and history (polygamy, agency, eternal marriage, pre-existence) lead to any interesting and/or significant differences between the Mormon and the mainstream novels (and how those markets developed). In a similar vein, it might be interesting to compare Christian end times novels with Mormon ones (although you have a much smaller body of work and time period to work with there).

I’m not really equipped to do this type of project. But even if I was, I’m not sure I would want to because my fear is that I’d do all the research and end up with no real differences.

This is not to say that I couldn’t come up with post-assimilationist literary criticism projects that would be interesting and potentially fruitful (and I think that literary criticism is one area where the late 20th century is as interesting as earlier periods because the 1970s to present are where the market for Mormon-oriented creative work has really exploded). But it would be useful to have some frameworks to talk about the earlier periods. The closest we really have is Eugene England’s four historical periods.

TT, I don’t think your observation under (1) is necessarily true, but perhaps it is, or perhaps that’s the direction of the trend (which would be a welcome one). Note, though, that recent seminal works on the twentieth century have continued the Great Man emphasis in Mormon history (e.g. biographies of SW Kimball and DO McKay). Quinn’s work on the 20th century, too, focuses on male elites, ie Great Men (Them’s the Deciders after all!). An important starting point for 20th century Mormon history is Jan Shipps’ recent essay in the journal Church History. I’ve heard she’s working on a history of Mormonism in the 20th century.

The differences between studies of Mormonism in the 19th and 20th centuries will have several reasons, which should become more clear and better developed as the 20th century becomes more closely examined. The Great Man approach will never go away, I think, because of the prophetic emphasis and long-standing historiographical and theological traditions.

I do hope we see more work done on 20th century Mormon culture, but that’s not an easy area to work on. Pre-assimilationist Mormonism is simply so much more interesting, both to Mormon and non-Mormon scholars, that it will continue to receive the bulk of attention. Mormons today are so much like evangelical Protestants that they deflect interest. (This is an important point to consider that often goes neglected in all the hoopla over the rise of Mormon studies, its supposed popularity at non-Utah, non-LDS schools, etc.)

Regarding your comment (2), I don’t have much to add to what I said in earlier posts, but I agree that the “divine distance” argument can be useful in certain contexts, e.g., in trying to explain to others what a Mormon prophet is, specifically in the context of Joseph Smith. Our non-LDS friends often start thinking of possible analogues–Buddha? Muhammad? Christ? Mary Baker Eddy?–what kind of a “prophet” exactly was Joseph Smith? A mystic?

(Incidentally, I was puzzled by R. Bushman’s assertion in Rough Stone Rolling that those in Joseph Smith’s milieu, being familiar with the Bible, should have better grasped the prophetic element of his calling, since it was in some ways a continuation or replication of the role of prophets in the Bible. That argument doesn’t make much sense to me.)

Fully agreed with your point (3). In addition, Givens completely distorts the picture by, on the one hand, comparing the material element of early LDS religion with the abstract formulations of the philosopher Rudolf Otto, and on the other hand, obscuring the extent to which the conceptual framework behind “collapsing sacred distance” relied upon contemporary cultural ideas. So there are both historical and philosophical questions here.

A third problem that I’m still thinking about in this regard is one of historical exigencies. Every new religious tradition, I would think, has to settle questions on community and worship style, which often affects architecture and the organization of physical space (Muhammad’s designs for early mosques are a good example). Of course Joseph’s contemporaries were not having visions about buildings and urban design, because these matters had long been settled in their traditions! The materiality of the plates is a completely different matter, I think, and these various purported instances of the “collapse” shouldn’t be lumped together. But again, religions throughout the ages have known various expressions of popular piety that have often incorporated material objects and other instances where the divine has hardly been “distant.” But the rich and abundant literature on material religion is simply disregarded by Givens, as far as I can tell, because it contradicts–or at least qualifies–much of his argument, and makes the LDS case less unique. That’s the most serious deficiency in his approach, I would say.

This is probably obvious to most readers of the book, but if we look at Orson F. Whitney as the chief, early theorist of what Mormon literature should be (the home literature movement), and then look at his influences (the Romantics, esp. the Romantic poets and esp. Byron), and then if we trace the home literature line up through the Covenant/Deseret Book-published genre fiction of the past 3 decades, I think it’s quite clear that Romanticism is a dominant strain in Mormon culture. Of course, one could argue that it’s also dominant in most popular American culture which leads us back to the uniqueness problem again.

However, it may be that the way this Romanticism is expressed is unique because a) parts of Mormon culture (and these are the parts that shop at DB and thus support the vast majority of Mormon-oriented cultural products) are more culturally conservative than, say “mainstream” American culture AND b) Mormons have (somewhat) unique views of the nature of agency and the divine origin and potential of individuals.

I wonder, for example, how the Mormon romance novel has changed over the past 120 or so year in comparison to the mainstream American market.

I also wonder how the Mormon post-apocalyptic thriller differs from the fundamentalist Christian one.

Not that I’m willing to take on those projects — I have others that I find more interesting.

I will say this: anecdotally, it appears that Mormon poets (both experienced and inexperienced ones) are more interested in traditional forms (and in the epic) than other poets.

A few more questions:
1) Why is that 19th century studies of Mormonism tend to focus on the “great men [and women]” of Mormonism, yet 20th century studies of Mormonism tend to focus more on culture? This seam is exemplified in Givens’s book, as you note. Is there a difference in training b/t those who are studying the 19th and 20th c?
2) In my casual conversations, Givens’ thesis about paradox and “divine distance” has had made a big splash. I think that your comparison of a this book to Shipps is a good analogy. Both books are problematic, but we are forever indebted to them. [I guess that is not really a question]
3) I think that your insistence on the issue of a genealogy of Mormonism’s ideas about divine distance is important. I think that we often grossly mischaracterize the broader theological tradition with reductionistic statements about divine distance in Western culture. For instance, as Mormons we tend to forget that that one guy, you know, Jesus Christ, is the figure who closed divine distance for most other Christians through the Incarnation and Atonement. This theological problem was not uniquely addressed by Mormons, but is perhaps the fundamental problem that Christianity addresses and we do an injustice by not recognizing that.