Item Detail
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30245
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1
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1
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English
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Land as Regenerative Space in The Book of Mormon
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Journal of Book of Mormon Studies
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2018
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27
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Champaign, IL
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University of Illinois Press
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187-196
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This is a text heavily concerned with men: Men are the storytellers, the narrators, the acting subjects throughout the book—fighting, smiting, and writing. In this, the need for reproduction produces a conceptual problem in that women are, essentially, absent from the text. This absence becomes a point of curiosity: In a text concerned with reproduction of a race, where do we find gestative bodies? In the absence of women, I will suggest, the Nephites turn to the land as regenerative space. Much of the mythology surrounding American relations with the land rests on depictions of land as a feminine space, echoing notions of early American pastoralism, presenting “harmony between man and
nature based on an experience of the land as essentially feminine; that is, not simply the land as mother, but the land as woman, the total female principle of gratification.” But we do not receive descriptions of these landscapes in The Book of Mormon; rather, land is conceptualized in two ways, as the “land of promise” and a “land of inheritance.” This regenerative role is made possible through these two conceptions, in that “promise” guarantees from God a regenerative space, and “inheritance” allows that space to be passed on through generations. Both promise and inheritance provide resources through which the Nephites may prosper. In this essay, I will argue that land takes on a regenerative role for the Nephites, who turn to land rather than women to “scatter their seed.”