Item Detail
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27992
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0
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4
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English
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"I Still Think of Myself as a Mormon" : The Autobiography of Wayne Booth – A Bold Experiment in Historiography
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Directions for Mormon Studies in the Twenty-First Century
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Salt Lake City, UT
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University of Utah Press
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237-249
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An area that neither historians nor social scientists have fully explored is the genre of Mormon autobiography and memoir, a genre that Levi Peterson focuses on the distinctive, even idiosyncratic, autobiography of Wayne Booth, who was raised as a Mormon but lapsed from church activity and even called himself an atheist as he went on to become one of the world's foremost literary critics. In his autobiography, Booth sought to find resolution among his many described "Selves," but Peterson questions whether Booth was as successful as he thought in arriving at this harmony. Booth's book does not fit within the established conventions of Mormon autobiography, which Peterson argues is precisely the point: it expands not only the boundaries of the genre but also our very conceptions of what it means for a person to be Mormon. Better capturing and understanding the internal pluralism of Mormonism will be one of the chief tasks of Mormon studies in the twenty-first century. [Editor's summary]