Understanding the Book of Mormon
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Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader's Guide, by Grant Hardy I've read this book very slowly this year; it's fascinating, but it's also fairly heavy-duty. Grant Hardy's complaint is that, in academia/the world outside the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, everybody spends so much time arguing about the origins of the Book of Mormon that they never examine the contents. He proposes a different approach that doesn't need everybody to agree about whether the book is fiction or history: why not examine the narrative as we would a literary work? The Book of Mormon has several different narrators, and we can examine their methods and motivations in the same way whether they were real or not. . ..if the Book of Mormon does not qualify as a literary masterpiece, it is nevertheless a complex and coherent work of literature, and its narratological strategies are of more than passing interest. Professors in English departments are probably not used