We could make a sexy venn diagram with all those as circles and see where we all fall….

Four-part ones come in all kinds of cool shapes.

Frankly, I can’t say I haven’t considered the option, especially since I’ve been participating more heavily on AMV the past couple of months. My biggest obstacles to undertaking such a project, however, are access, as Wm and I have briefly discussed in another context, and (of course) time. But it’s something I’d love to do.

Maybe I can eat this elephant bite by bite as part of my doctoral studies and my continued affiliation with AMV.

I’d love to see someone flesh out a more detailed history of Mormon literature. I clearly don’t have the background to take it on.

Perhaps you do, Tyler?

I think you bring up some interesting questions in relation to the accuracy of literary histories in general and, as Wm mentions, that you’re spot on when you observe that the home literature movement–largely didactic and less focused on the aesthetics of form–continued during the “Lost Generation” period (a designation England took, in relation to LDS lit, from Edward Geary’s essay, “Mormondom’s Lost Generation: Novelists of the 1940s”). That particular strain also continues today in much of the popular literature holding shelf space at LDS bookstores and in LDS homes, something England doesn’t fully account for in his framework, which, to be honest, is in need of updating and expanding.

Perhaps England may have done better to label his final period “Spiritual Realism” rather than “Faithful Realism” and then stated more clearly what he meant by the term. The former designation, which is where England may have taken his inspiration for the latter, comes from Lavina Fielding Anderson, who in her 1983 AML Presidential Address, as England says elsewhere, “described how this new voice is developing in fiction, as we move beyond the sentimental literature of the late nineteenth century that persists in our official magazines and popular novels and also beyond the somewhat alienated fiction of the 1930s and 1940s”. Says she: “I see the new Mormon fiction as attempting something more ambitious. It is literature of intelligent affirmation, not of alienation, fiction that takes as its province the hitherto unexplored field of spiritual realism.” And by “spiritual realism” she means, again in her words,

the conflicts that a character may encounter in his or her social settings are primarily important as they provide information about the interior spiritual life of that person. The experiences move the person toward a greater understanding of the ambiguous nature of human good and human depravity. They affirm or challenge the reality of God. They illuminate by recording those perplexing moments when prayers are not answered and the equally perplexing moments when they are. They shoulder the burden of a community with a vision of holiness and unity that stands in contrast to its inevitable pettiness and cruelties of daily living. They attempt to make sense out of a large picture of human interaction that includes the values of faith, commitment, deepest doubts and anger focused on a seemingly uncaring God and swelling rejoicing and gratitude focused on a seemingly loving and watchful God.

Spiritual realism, then, isn’t so much an attempt to depict things as being objectively real (as in the more general realism literary movement) but to illustrate the way spiritual realities and the paradoxes and ethical dilemmas of the universe weigh in our lives. In this light, Card’s ethical fiction is spiritually real because it, for the most part, involves us with his characters in the quest to resolve or transcend the difficult ambiguities of existence. Meyer’s fiction, what Anderson might call “pretty romances” or “cute tales of cute adolescents” isn’t so much spiritually real as it is, well, “cheap and easy fiction” that “deals in simple conflicts, simply resolved”–just let Edward do all the thinking–and that, IMO and Anderson’s words, “considers the craft of fiction as relatively unimportant.”

But, I’ve gone on too long. Maybe someday someone will pick up where England left off and, doing as Wm suggests needs to be done, flesh out these Mormon literary periods into more complex critical frameworks.