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On the History of LDS Literature
In November 2005, I discovered, in a review of the Wikipedia article on Mormon Fiction, that the authors of the article thought Mormon Fiction essentially didn’t exist before 1979. Since I knew this...
View ArticleThe Hero’s Journey of the Mormon Arts
. As Motley Vision‘s newest Official Contributor, I feel an obligation to have my first post explain something of my experience within and attitude towards the Mormon arts. Several months ago, I...
View ArticleSunday Lit Crit Sermon: George Reynolds on ‘Outside Literature’
My previous “Lit Crit Sermons” have been from sources that generally took a positive view of literature, seeing the role of the author or poet as an important and divinely inspired one. That view is,...
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Sunday Lit Crit Sermon: Promoting Amusements — David O. McKay
It is, perhaps, one thing to specify what books and other media should be consumed, and quite another to make that material available. While many commentators today will suggest that the bulk of what...
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Sunday Lit Crit Sermon: The Young Woman’s Journal on Novel Reading
First Page of the Young Women's Journal, 1889 With the advent of the home literature movement in the end of the 19th century, Mormon culture began to produce novels for the first time. For decades...
View ArticleThe serious dethroned; the middlebrow ceasing to strive
In the April 2012 issue of Commentary, Fred Siegel writes about How Highbrows Killed Culture. It’s your rather standard conservative curmudgeon fretting over culture. I don’t agree with much of it. And...
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Sunday Lit Crit Sermon: Whitney on the role of Mormon literature
Orson F. Whitney One sermon given by Orson F. Whitney is cited more than any other when we talk about Mormon literature. The sermon was given on June 3rd, 1888 in the Salt Lake Tabernacle during the...
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Sunday Lit Crit Sermon: Whitney on the blessings of Literature
Orson F. Whitney concludes his Home Literature sermon by invoking the blessings that literature has provided to mankind and urging his audience to create literature, not because it is how they should...
View ArticleCracroft in the Ensign on Mormon lit
While searching the archives of The Ensign, I ran across something I had never read before: a two part series by Richard Cracroft on Mormon literature published back in 1981. Here are the links: Part 1...
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Sunday Lit Crit Sermon: Nephi Anderson on the immoral in drama
When we hear principles taught from the pulpit, they sometimes seem remote, disconnected from reality. So speakers often add stories, sometimes fictional, to their sermons, so that we can put the...
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