Item Detail
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31879
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2
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9
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English
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“The Writing of the Fruit of Thy Loins” : Reading, Writing, and Prophecy in The Book of Mormon
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Americanist Approaches to the Book of Mormon
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New York, NY
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Oxford University Press
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"The Book of Mormon is the story of how ancient Israelites established a civilization in the Americas, but it is also the story of the book itself : how the records were acquired, composed, labored over, protected, lost, abridged, preserved for a thousand years, and finally buried so that the plates could, as prophesied, be discovered by Joseph Smith centuries later. The prominence of the reader and writer is not just an incidental feature of this scripture, but is essential to the Mormon understanding of the relationship between human and divine. This essay identifies three key narrative features of The Book of Mormon : the centrality of readers and witnesses to the creation of scripture, the primacy of the act of writing in revelation and prophecy, and the mediation that allows a single person to inhabit multiple narrative categories. Biblical prophets, especially “writing prophets” like Jeremiah and Ezekiel, share some features with the prophets of The Book of Mormon , such as first-person narration and dialogue with God. Yet there is little biblical precedent for The Book of Mormon’s intense focus on its own textuality and its own narrative practices or for the ways in which prophets transcend their passive, anointed roles and become authors of scripture in their own right. Its insistent textuality does, however, link The Book of Mormon to other scriptural and prophetic forms that arose in the antebellum United States. While the Mormon prophets vary in their literary style, narrative techniques, and personal presence, the centrality of reading, writing, and the system of scripture-craft is persistent." [Author]
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By the Hand of Mormon : The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion
Open Canons : Sacred History and American History in The Book of Mormon
Sacred Borders : Continuing Revelation and Canonical Restraint in Early America
The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse
The Book of Mormon : A Very Short Introduction
The Book of Mormon : The Earliest Text
The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism
Translating Time : The Nature and Function of Joseph Smith's Narrative Cannon
Understanding the Book of Mormon : A Reader's Guide