Earlier this month Time magazine used the popularity of Harry Potter to look at fan fiction. I was a little surprised to find that not only is the fan fiction universe much larger than I supposed (fanfiction.net alone has more than half a million Harry Potter works and more than 2 million total), but that [...]

Unlike many, I do not believe a text can truly be divorced from its author. Maybe it’s the historian in me, but the more I find out about an author, the more I am fascinated and enlightened by the text. So it’s difficult for me to address a work, when I have met the author, not [...]

OK, so I recently came across a notice for Android Karenina, apparently the latest pastiche in the wave that began with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and includes titles like Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and my favorite title, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim.
So, of course I began [...]

In a sense, Mormon Literature began 178 years ago this month, with the publication of the Evening and Morning Star.

The first of seven posts, following an introduction posted last week.
Effectively, Mormonism begins with the publication of a book.
The publication of the Book of Mormon in 1830 gave the nascent Church content and direction—content in the form of a tangible object that could be delivered to investigators, and direction in the form of a stated [...]

Introduction to Textual Criticism
Part VI
Somewhere in some book I perused about existentialism is the comment that any philosophical movement that can contain both a devout Christian like Søren Kierkegaard and a devout anti-Christian like Friedrich Nietszche must be very broad indeed. I mentioned that once to Jim Faulconer, from whom I took several philosophy classes, [...]

Introduction to Textual Criticism
Part V
As the Book of Mormon is the cornerstone of our religion,  so the original manuscript was the cornerstone of the Nauvoo House, or at least it was in the cornerstone from 1841-1882, when Lewis Bidamon, Emma’s second husband, removed it. It was badly damaged by water and mold and only [...]

Introduction to Textual Variants Part IV
When my father taught as a Fulbright professor at the University of Oulu, Finland in 1970-71 we took along an anthology of humor, maybe A Sub-treasury of American Humor, ed. by E. B. White, which had this piece by Robert Benchley with the very strange title “Filling that Hiatus,” about [...]