A sampling of Mormon literary criticism from Dialogue’s archives

To celebrate the liberation of Dialogue’s archives from the clumsy format they were previously in*, I thought I’d pull out a few pieces of Mormon literary criticism for AMV readers to download and peruse. There’s some excellent stuff there, and the virtue of the PDF format is that one has the piece in a self-contained easily opened, read and referenced format. And don’t forget that even if you can’t subscribe, there’s always the option to donate $5 or $10 as a show of appreciation for making the archives available. So here’s a few cool pieces that I’ve found so far (please note that the links are to PDF downloads of the article):

• “Telling It Slant: Aiming for Truth in Contemporary Mormon Literature” by William Mulder (6.1.1993) — one of the true classics of Mormon criticism
• “Toward a ‘Marriage Group’ of Contemporary Mormon Short Stories” by B.W. Jorgensen (12.1.2004) — a great, exhaustive round up of Mormon short stories about marriage encapsulated in an excellent framework.
• “Faithful Fiction: ‘Greening Wheat: Fifteen Mormon Short Stories’” by Eugene England (12.1.1985) — in this review of one of the seminal Mormon short story anthologies England teases out the whole notion of faithful fiction.
• “Sensational Virtue: Nineteenth-Century Mormon Fiction and American Popular Taste” by Karen Lynn (9.1.1981) — an pre-Viper on the Hearth look at Mormons in American popular fiction with an emphasis on portrayals of Mormon women and polygamy.

This is just a small sampling of the riches available. I’m particularly looking forward to reading some of the original reviews of works that are now considered part of the Mormon canon (such as it is).

One more thought: what do you think of adding work like what I’ve linked to above to AMV’s Friday Feature rotation?

*Of course, now articles and full editions are dumped in to PDF files, but hey, at least the PDFs are searchable (and the search engine is much faster and more intuitive than what was found in the UofU archive solution), and really it’s the best we could hope for considering the limitations involved.