Description

Anyone who attended the first meeting of the Association for Mormon Letters in 1976 would have left the meeting optimistic about the future of Mormon Literary Studies. Fifty years later, though, it is clear that the academic study of Mormon literature has not kept pace with most other areas of Mormon Studies. Articles in peer-reviewed journals are rare, and scholarly monographs are close to non-existent. One of the primary obstacles to scholarly work on Mormon literature is the lack of a Mormon literary tradition. Simply put, most literary scholarship boils down to arguing about what constitutes a canon, and we have no canon to argue about. This presentation will explore some of the general requirements for a Mormon literary canon and present specific, largely ignored literary works that might become part of a Mormon Literary Tradition.

Michael Austin is the Provost and Academic Vice President at Snow College in

Ephraim, Utah. When not fighting low-stakes academic battles of great intensity, he studies and writes about Mormon literature. He is the author of Rereading Job: Understanding the Ancient World’s Greatest Poem, Vardis Fisher: A Mormon Novelist, and Testimony of Two Nations: How the Book of Mormon Reads and Rereads the Bible. He is the recipient of five Association for Mormon Letters Awards, including the 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award. He is currently working on a history of Mormon literature tentatively titled The Lord’s Song in a Strange Land.