Item Detail
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27509
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11
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0
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English
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Boadicea, the Mormon Wife : Life-Scenes in Utah
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Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York
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Arthur R. Orton ; Greg Kofford Books
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95
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[2018 John Whitmer Historical Association winner for Best Anthology Book]
First published in 1855, Boadicea; the Mormon Wife belongs to a sub-genre of crime fiction that flourished in the Eastern United States during the 1850s. Boadicea has become increasingly important to scholars of Mormonism because it gives us a glimpse of the Mormon image in literature immediately after the Church’s public acknowledgement of plural marriage. Over the next half century, this image would be sharpened and refined by writers with different rhetorical goals: to end polygamy, to attack Mormon theology, or just to tell a highly entertaining adventure story. In Boadicea, though, we see these tropes in their infancy, through a prolific author working at break-neck speed to imagine the lives of a strange people for readers willing to pay the “extremely low price of 15 cents” for the privilege of being amazed by stories of polygyny and polyandry, along with generous helpings of adultery, seduction, kidnapping, and no fewer than fourteen untimely but spectacular deaths: people are shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, poisoned, hanged, strangled, and drowned. No other novel of the nineteenth century comes anywhere near Boadicea in portraying Mormon society as violent, chaotic, and dysfunctional. [Publisher]
Part of The Mormon Image in Literature series.
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"A Dogged Resolve" : The Doctrine and Decline of Mormon Plural Marriage, 1841–1890
A Foreign Kingdom : Mormons and Polygamy in American Political Culture, 1852-1890
Constructing a National Marital and Sexual Culture : Reconsidering the "Twin Relics of Barbarism"
Defending Zion : George Q. Cannon and the California Mormon Newspaper Wars of 1856-1857
Make Yourselves Gods : Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism
Marking Mormon Difference : How Western Perceptions of Islam Defined the 'Mormon Menace'
'No True Woman' : Conflicted Female Subjectivities in Women's Popular 19th Century Western Adventure Tales
Reconstruction and Mormon America
Religion of a Different Color : Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness
The Mormon Question : Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America
Victorian Pornographic Imagery in Anti-Mormon Literature