ENGLISH

The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy (Religion in America)

By Terryl Givens

Book information

Year
1997
ISBN
0195101839, 9780195101836, 9781429415262
LCC
BX8645.5 .G58 1997
Open Library ID
OL7387788M
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
15 MB (15332334 bytes)
Pages
232\228
Scanned
yes
Time added
2011-06-04 13:46:07

Description

Nineteenth-century American writers frequently cast the Mormon as a stock villain in such fictional genres as mysteries, westerns, and popular romances. The Mormons were depicted as a violent and perverse people--the "viper on the hearth"--who sought to violate the domestic sphere of the mainstream. While other critics have mined the socio-political sources of anti-Mormonism, Givens is the first to reveal how popular fiction, in its attempt to deal with the sources and nature of this conflict, constructed an image of the Mormon as a religious and social "Other."

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