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."
- ISBN10 0195356349
- ISBN13 9780195356342
- Publish Date December 1997 (first published 1 January 1997)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Oxford University Press
- Format eBook
- Pages 228
- Language English