“weird” Mormon art and fiction recently came up on the AML Discord, which led me to share some thoughts I had on what’s happened with Mormon literature since Eugene England last revised his essay Mormon Literature: Progress and Prospects in the late 1990s.
In doing so I drew on an essay I submitted to Dialogue, which they returned to me for revision. They were right to do so. I was trying to do too much and wasn’t as precise as I needed to be. I’m also not certain that this is even a useful model. I also don’t know when I will have time to revise the essay or if I even want to—I think it’d be better to take much smaller slices and go in depth with those.
So when Andrew invited me to post the essay on the AML blog, I decided that while the full essay wasn’t baked enough to do that, at the very least I could share the core model just in case others find it interesting/useful. And maybe I will develop aspects of it as I have time.
In Mormon Literature: Progress and Prospects, England cites more than 120 authors and works and sketches out boundaries and creates a canon for Mormon literature in a more comprehensive way than any other previous attempts, including the groundbreaking anthology A Believing People: Literature of the Latter-day Saints. More importantly, his (albeit brief) commentary in the essay makes claims both for the history and future of Mormon literature, including breaking up Mormon literature into the following periods (para. 22; note that the bracketed capsule summaries of each period are mine):
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Foundations, 1830-80 [unsophisticated but promising foundations]
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Home Literature, 1880-1930 [didactic but popular strivings]
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The Lost Generation, 1930-70 [the work of alienated expatriates]
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Faithful Realism, 1960-present (the 1990s) [fairly sophisticated, a bit belated, modestly popular attempts at a middle ground]
This periodization of Mormon literature is not only a work of literary history by England—it’s also an expression of hope for the future and him putting his weight behind a form of Mormon fiction he found valuable (and seemed to prefer reading).
The 21st century has not seen faithful realism quite flourish in the way England seemed to hope it would.
So what happened to faithful realism?
First, the caveats:
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The extent to which faithful realism is a useful category for describing Mormon literature is debatable.
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The notion of realism in literature is a contested thing, and England uses it not quite as precisely as some scholars would in using, say, the term literary realism. In addition, no fiction is truly mimetic and even the most speculative works engage in forms of mimesis
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The term faithful is also fraught, and, indeed, England grouped works under the faithful realism that some of his contemporaries (Richard Cracroft) would not label as faithful. England is comfortable with both the sophic and the mantic as faithful.
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When I use the term “post” below, I am, yes, invoking postmodernism to a certain extent, but not in the caricatured way that term has often been used. Remember that post means after, which means a reaction to but also simply what’s next.
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At the same time, I think invoking modernism is important. In the way that Mormon culture is so often belated, I think what we see in the 21st century is the echoes of all the issues of modernism finally catching up to Mormonism and Mormon culture, and artists and writers trying to figure out what to do with that.
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Genre and literary history models are (usually) not how authors think about themselves, and the backgrounds and conditions that lead to works that literary critics group together can be very diverse, even at odds.
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This model is concerned solely with literature that features Mormon characters, settings, doctrine, themes, etc. That are in some way overtly Mormon. There’s another strand of Mormon literary history of the early 21st century that has to do with the explosion of Mormons writing (usually non-overtly Mormon) fiction for the national market. There’s also the continuation of home literature and the way it has transformed in the 21st century. Both are ripe topics for further exploration.
The 21st Century Faithful Realism split
As I see it, the 21st century has seen a fragmentation of Faithful Realism into four streams:
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Faithful Realism
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Post-Faithful Realism
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Faithful Post-Realism
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Post-Faithful Post-Realism
The causes of this split are both obvious and not so obvious and varied and have to do with Mormonism and also have to do with other types of culture, trends, and experiences. There is a lot of fun work to be done in teasing all that out. Much more than can be contained in a single blog post.
A few things regarding this model.
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The post-faithful and post-realism strands tie into (and are likely partially caused by) larger trends in U.S. religious and literary culture, specifically the loosening of strong religious denominational affiliation and the mainstreaming of genre fiction.
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Also remember what I said about “post” above. The post designation is more in relation to how England (and others of his generation like Marden C. Clark) understand the purpose of literature and Mormon literature than a useful description of the current field. The details and nuances of all this deserve further attention.
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The extent to which works and authors that we might place into any one of these categories would identify themselves in such a category varies widely as does the extent to their engagement with and awareness of Mormon literature as a field. However, that doesn’t necessarily disqualify inclusion in those categories. This is because their works often still relate specifically to a vision and/or experience of Mormonism and Mormon culture(s) that puts them in dialogue with the whole notion of Mormon literature, especially as Eugene England would articulate it.
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The model feels a bit too tidy to me. At the same time, it does capture many of the main strands of Mormon literary activity of the past two decades.
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As someone who writes fiction, I find myself torn by such categorization. On the one hand, I could point to some of my stories and say they’re in the tradition of faithful realism and point and others and say they’re pretty clearly faithful post-realism. On the other, I don’t know how useful those terms are at looking at my work. They all feel part of the same project to me. Of course, lines are always blurry with these things anyway.
So there you have it: a rough model for how I view what’s happened with Mormon literature in the 21st century, one that I feel conflicted about, but not so conflicted about to keep it tucked away in a drawer.
Your mileage may vary.
Meanwhile, I may figure out if it makes sense to take the car for a few laps around the track. Or I may very well stick to writing fiction.