Book Of Mormon Summary
The Book of Mormon, presented as the translation of a recovered, ancient text, chronicles the history of a people who, while originating in the traditionally recognizable near eastern biblical landscape, journeyed to, and settled in America. It is traditionally read as a wholly religious text
I approach this work as a piece of literature, and the imaginative work of Joseph Smith as its single author, in so doing I hope to explore his use of the device of first-person narration as it appears in “The First Book of Nephi” (hereafter referred to as 1 Nephi) and how it fits into (and perhaps even anticipates) the emerging movement of romantic idealism during the American Renaissance of its contemporary nineteenth-century New England.
It is
not much of a stretch to incorporate Smith’s text into the Romantic movement; its 1830 publication places it within a few years of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature as well his “American Scholar” address and the essay “Self-Reliance,” and its depiction of a sort of original American experience, it falls in line with the emerging idealistic notions of the day. While it appears as a work that’s primary concern is the presentation of a sacred, Royal Skousen admits, in his introduction to the Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text, that its text does more than simply address the religious issues, claiming that it can “be seen as a participant in wider debates concerning the nature of scripture and miracles, public morality, Enlightenment skepticism, Romantic ideas of individualism and direct contact with the divine and American notions of egalitarianism and freedom” (Skousen xxiv). It is these penultimate observation that I wish to explore in the paper.
I approach this work as a piece of literature, and the imaginative work of Joseph Smith as its single author, in so doing I hope to explore his use of the device of first-person narration as it appears in “The First Book of Nephi” (hereafter referred to as 1 Nephi) and how it fits into (and perhaps even anticipates) the emerging movement of romantic idealism during the American Renaissance of its contemporary nineteenth-century New England.
It is
not much of a stretch to incorporate Smith’s text into the Romantic movement; its 1830 publication places it within a few years of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature as well his “American Scholar” address and the essay “Self-Reliance,” and its depiction of a sort of original American experience, it falls in line with the emerging idealistic notions of the day. While it appears as a work that’s primary concern is the presentation of a sacred, Royal Skousen admits, in his introduction to the Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text, that its text does more than simply address the religious issues, claiming that it can “be seen as a participant in wider debates concerning the nature of scripture and miracles, public morality, Enlightenment skepticism, Romantic ideas of individualism and direct contact with the divine and American notions of egalitarianism and freedom” (Skousen xxiv). It is these penultimate observation that I wish to explore in the paper.