Thesis (M.A.)-- Brigham Young University. Dept. of Art. / Bibliography: leaves 67-70.

My original idea for the book was to do a picturesque-type novel, with chapters that would practically be short stories in themselves. But as I got into the writing of it, I decided to pursue one main theme--Sister Harper's conflicts regarding her missionary calling--working them out to a climax and a resolution. I still intended to give the book a picturesque flavor, however, by embellishing it with digressions, sidelines, and banalities that are always a part of missionary life.

This "Annotated Bibliography of Literary Mormon Humor" includes over five hundred sources, cross-referenced to pertinent commentary and criticism, and divided into seven sections: "Humor in Mormon Fiction," "Humor in Mormon Non-Fiction," "Mormon Criticism Assessing ‘Inside Humor,’" "Gentile Criticism of the Saints' Humor," "Gentile Humor About Mormons," "Mormon Criticism of Gentile Humor," and "Mormon Internet Humor," all made accessible to scholars by a comprehensive index of more than one thousand topics. The author has filed selected photocopied pages of alphabetized, annotated items by author, or chronologically as periodicals, into a twenty-volume Archive of Mormon Humor in Literature, housed at the Center for Study of Christian Values in Literature, 3076E JKHB, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. The introduction includes the author's survey of recent trends in Mormon literary humor.This compilation of Mormon humor and literary criticism conclusively dispels the notion that Mormons are humorless. Indeed, this bibliography convincingly documents the fact that the Mormon people enjoy laughing at themselves.

Three general questions concerning literature have been addressed by the writers considered in this thesis: What constitutes a work of literary art? What ought to be valued by Latter-day Saints in a literary work? How should criticism be conducted by Latter-day Saints? To the first question, five basic answers have been proposed: significant form, uplifting thought content clothed in decorative form, typological symbol, ikon (as the word is used by C S lewis in An Experiment in Criticism), and capacity for helping the reader achieve a kind of "negative capability." These definitions also tend to be statements of value, and thus answer the second question, with the proviso that works must ultimately be tested against the theological standard of the gospel of Jesus Christ. As to the third question, virtually all of the writers agree that all critical judgments must be informed and confirmed by the Holy Spirit; otherwise, critical method, like critical value, is closely related to definition of literature.

Previously, no one has analyzed the short stories of Mormon periodicals from their inception in the late nineteenth century until 1940. The body of this study attempts to do so and has two main aims.First, it evaluates the literary development of largely sentimental stories written for Mormon youth. Sentimentality in fiction was an extreme form of romanticism which flourished in America throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. As other forms of realistic writing became more acceptable in the nation, Mormon writers gradually accommodated their literary styles to conform with national trends. They retained a significant amount of sentimentality in their short stories, possibly to preserve their religious and cultural values.Secondly, this study describes the sociological implications of Mormon short stories. This aim is secondary to the literary aim but none the less valuable for students interested in discovering Mormon cultural trends as they are reflected in Mormon short stories.

In researching the literary and visual art forms of four Utah Mormon artists/authors, considerable evidence supports the prognosis that natural parallels do exist between the written and visual works of artists/authors. Recent as well as past historical data also confirms this hypothesis.To implement research personal interviews and written questionnaires were submitted. The resultant data compiled supports the prognosis that this parallelism does exist.

The few studies of Mormon home literature that have been published to date dismiss it as inferior artistry, an embarrassing if necessary step in the progression towards true Mormon literature. These studies are inadequate, however, because they divorce the texts from their context, holding them up to standards that did not exist for their original audience. Jane Tompkins' theory of texts as cultural work provides a more satisfactory way of looking at these narratives. Home literature is thoroughly enmeshed in the cultural discourse of its day. Beneath the surface, these didactic stories about young Mormons finding love with their foreordained mates performed important cultural work by helping Mormons to think about their personal and collective identities, by co-opting mainstream fictional forms and giving them safe expression, and by reconceptualizing marriage in the wake of polygamy's demise. The stories of Susa Young Gates illustrate these functions well. Gates was a prominent youth leader and prolific home author during the 1890s. Her stories extend and enact Mormon cultural discourse of the time and point up the connections between Mormon fiction and mainstream models. The last decade of the nineteenth century marked the beginning of Mormonism's transition from an isolated separatist movement to a thoroughly assimilated and modem mainstream religion. As Mormons shifted away from the defining practices of polygamy, communal economics, and ecclesiastical dominance of politics, they sought for new ways to define themselves that would retain their sense of distinctness from a world they still viewed as sinful. The result was new emphasis on formerly dormant or relatively unemphasized practices such as the Word of Wisdom and the law of tithing. This emphasis shows up in the story "Donald's Boy" which repeatedly focuses on the necessity for Mormon youth to shun the corruptions of the world. "Seven Times," which ran in the 1893-94 volume of the Young Woman's Journal, shows Gates's debt to mainstream fiction in its extensive adoption of popular conventions, reworking such devices as the heroine's development, the divine child, the lecherous villain, and the sick bed ordeal into a Mormon conversion narrative. As in popular American fiction, the role of the narrator is central to the didactic intentions of the story. The narrator becomes the dominant personality of the text as she both creates and controls the emotion necessary to the formal and ideological demands of the narrative. Gates claimed to consider popular didactic fiction inconsequential, but her own comments and her wholesale use of its conventions suggests that her relationship with these novels was much more complex than she acknowledged. "John Stevens' Courtship" is Gates's most popular and ambitious work. Its setting in the early years of Mormon settlement in Utah at the time of the first large-scale influx of "outsiders" into Mormon society constructs an idealized view of early Mormon culture that contrasts with the diminished faithfulness Gates perceived in her day. Gates's artistic ambitions show up most clearly in her intense descriptions of her characters. These character descriptions draw on popular conventions to inscribe idealized gender constructs that interacted with Mormon ideology to remain in force in Mormon society long after they had faded elsewhere. Finally, Gates's emphasis on the idea of a foreordained mate replaces polygamy as the essential doctrine of marriage, an important shift in post-Manifesto Mormondom.