Ordinary accounts of extraordinary value : mormon pioneer women's life writings

Abstract

Considering personal literature as a distinct literary genre that reveals and preserves their authors' identity and voice, and that demands its own parameters for literary analysis, this study investigates two nineteenth century Mormon women's life writings: Mary Jane Mount Tanner's journals and Patience Loader Rozsa Archer's autobiography, taking into account their value as historical documents, which not only demonstrate an effective way to access the past, but also have already proven to be fundamental for the reconstruction of the Mormon experience and preservation and conveyance of its group identity and collective memory. Attempting at understanding how literature, history and memory merge, this study presentes the development of the comprehension of memory as a social phenomenon and summarizes the contributions of important thinkers like Halbwachs, Le Goff, Connerton and Hobsbawn. It also provides an outline of the history of the United States in the nineteenth century to contextualize the historical and social frames in which those texts are inserted.