Tending the Garden: Essays on Mormon Literature

Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1996. First Edition. 219pp. Octavo [23 cm] Illustrated wrappers. Near fine.

- 'Mormon Storytellers' by Dale L. Morgan
- 'On Words and the Word of God: The Delusions of a Mormon Literature' by Karl Keller
- 'Mormondom's Lost Generation: The Novelists of the 1940s' by Edward A. Geary
- 'Toward a More Perfect Order Within: Being the Confessions of an Unregenerate but not Unrepentant Mistruster of Mormon Literature' by Marden J. Clark
- 'To Tell and Hear Stories: Let the Stranger Say' by Bruce W. Jorgensen
- 'Just the Fiction Ma'am' by Tory C. Anderson
- 'Desirable Fruit: Book of Mormon Imagery' by Richard Dilworth Rust
- 'Literary Form and Historical Understanding: Joseph Smith's First Vision' by Neal E. Lambert and Richard H. Cracoft
- 'The Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt: Some Literary, Historical, and Critical Reflections' by R.A. Christmas
- 'The Didactic Heresy as Orthodox Tool: B.H. Roberts as Writer of Home Literature' by Richard H. Cracroft
- 'Juanita Brooks: The Mormon Historian as Tragedian' by Levi S. Peterson
- 'I, Eye, Aye: A Personal Essay on Personal Essays' by Mary Lythgoe Bradford
- 'Beyond Jack Fiction: Recent Achievement in the Mormon Novel' by Eugene England
- 'Mormon Folklore: Cut from the Marrow of Everday Experience' by William A. Wilson
- 'From Walden Pond to the Great Salt Lake: Ecobiography and Endangered Species Acts in Walden and Refuge' by Cecilia Konchar Farr and Phillip A. Snyder. Part of Signature Books' Essays on Mormonism series, Tending the Garden combines the insights of fifteen different authors on the history and direction of Mormon fiction. This first book-length collection of 15 essays on Mormon literature discusses such classic narratives as Joseph Smith's first vision and Parley P. Pratt's Autobiography, more recent experiments such as Levi Peterson's The Backslider and Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge, and addresses the question of what constitutes Mormon aesthetics. In addition to describing the historical development of Mormon letters, essayists explore Mormon contributions to folklore, personal essay, home literature, novels, and historical tragedy.