Item Detail
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27993
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0
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16
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English
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Art and Artifice : The Role of Memoir in Mormon Identity Formation
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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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250-266
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The diversity of the Mormon experience is a key theme in Jana Riess's examination of the role of memoir in the articulation and shaping of Mormon identity. She traces the distinctive Mormon penchant for record keeping to the belief that individual lives matter because they are part of God's workings in the world; diary keeping and memoir writing thus become testimonial acts of documenting God's dealings with his children. Surveying a number of Mormon memoirs from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, by both female and male authors, Riess demonstrates how they typically serve one of three purposes: as propaganda, in which the memoirist has an agenda and gets the last word; as a vehicle to communicate ineffable spiritual experience, faithfully if incompletely; or to explore the tensions between faith-promoting experience and a more earthbound realism. [Editor's summary]
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A Mormon Mother : An Autobiography of Annie Clark Tanner
Bringing Elizabeth Home : A Journey of Faith and Hope
Confessions of a Latter-day Virgin : A Memoir
From Housewife to Heretic
Joseph Smith : Rough Stone Rolling
Leaving the Saints : How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith
Mormonism : The Story of a New Religious Tradition
My Story
Shifting Borders and a Tattered Passport :
Intellectual journeys of a Mormon academic
Still, the Small Voice Narrative, Personal Revelation, and the Mormon Folk Tradition
The Book of Mormon Girl : A Memoir of an American Faith
The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance : A Memoir
The Polygamous Wives Writing Club : From the Diaries of Mormon Pioneer Women
The Revised and Enhanced History of Joseph Smith by His Mother
Toward the Folkloristic Study of Latter-day Saint Conversion Narratives
Way Below the Angels : The Pretty Clearly Troubled but not Even Close to Tragic Confessions of a Real Live Mormon Missionary