Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon

Elizabeth Fenton is Associate Professor of English at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Religious Liberties: Anti-Catholicism and Liberal Democracy in Nineteenth-Century US Literature and Culture (Oxford, 2011).Jared Hickman is Associate Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Black Prometheus: Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery (Oxford, 2016) and co-editor (with Martha Schoolman) of Abolitionist Places (Routledge, 2016).

• Part One: Plates and Print 1: R. John Williams: The Ghost and the Machine: Plates and Paratext in The Book of Mormon 2: Jillian Sayre: Books Buried in the Earth: The Book of Mormon, Revelation, and the Humic Foundations of the Nation 3: Paul Gutjahr: Orson Pratt's Enduring Influence on The Book of Mormon Part Two: Scripture and Secularity 4: Grant Hardy: The Book of Mormon and the Bible 5: Eran Shalev: An American Book of Chronicles: Pseudo-Biblicism and the Cultural Origins of The Book of Mormon 6: Samuel Brown: "To Read the Round of Eternity": Speech, Text, and Scripture in The Book of Mormon 7: Laura Thiemann Scales: "The writing of the fruit of thy loins": Reading, Writing, and Prophecy in The Book of Mormon 8: Grant Shreve: Nephite Secularization; or, Picking and Choosing in The Book of Mormon Part Three: Indigeneity and Imperialism 9: Nancy Bentley: Kinship, The Book of Mormon, and Modern Revelation 10: Peter Coviello: How the Mormons Became White: Scripture, Sex, Sovereignty 11: Elizabeth Fenton: Nephites and Israelites: The Book of Mormon and the Hebraic Indian Theory 12: Kimberly Berkey and Joseph Spencer: "Great Cause to Mourn": The Complexity of The Book of Mormon's Presentation of Gender and Race 13: Stanley J. Thayne: "We're going to take our land back over": Reading The Book of Mormon from an Indigenous Space Part Four: Genre and Generation 14: Terryl Givens: The Book of Mormon and the Reshaping of Covenant 15: Amy Easton-Flake: "Arise from the Dust, My Sons, and Be Men": Masculinity in The Book of Mormon 16: Zachary McLeod Hutchins: "I Lead the Way, like Columbus": Joseph Smith, Genocide, and Revelatory Ambiguity 17: Edward Whitley: Book of Mormon Poetry

This volume of essays succeeds in demonstrating to secular scholars that the Book of Mormon is a supremely valuable object with which to study many of the central themes of nineteenth-century American life. But it also succeeds and showing faithful, but perhaps bored, Latter-day Saints that there is much more to the Book of Mormon than meets the Sunday school eye.