Part One: Plates and Print 1: R. John Williams: The Ghost and the Machine: Plates and Paratext in The Book of Mormon 2: Jillian Sayre: Books Buried in the Earth: The Book of Mormon, Revelation, and the Humic Foundations of the Nation 3: Paul Gutjahr: Orson Pratt's Enduring Influence on The Book of Mormon Part Two: Scripture and Secularity 4: Grant Hardy: The Book of Mormon and the Bible 5: Eran Shalev: An American Book of Chronicles: Pseudo-Biblicism and the Cultural Origins of The Book of Mormon 6: Samuel Brown: "To Read the Round of Eternity": Speech, Text, and Scripture in The Book of Mormon 7: Laura Thiemann Scales: "The writing of the fruit of thy loins": Reading, Writing, and Prophecy in The Book of Mormon 8: Grant Shreve: Nephite Secularization; or, Picking and Choosing in The Book of Mormon Part Three: Indigeneity and Imperialism 9: Nancy Bentley: Kinship, The Book of Mormon, and Modern Revelation 10: Peter Coviello: How the Mormons Became White: Scripture, Sex, Sovereignty 11: Elizabeth Fenton: Nephites and Israelites: The Book of Mormon and the Hebraic Indian Theory 12: Kimberly Berkey and Joseph Spencer: "Great Cause to Mourn": The Complexity of The Book of Mormon's Presentation of Gender and Race 13: Stanley J. Thayne: "We're going to take our land back over": Reading The Book of Mormon from an Indigenous Space Part Four: Genre and Generation 14: Terryl Givens: The Book of Mormon and the Reshaping of Covenant 15: Amy Easton-Flake: "Arise from the Dust, My Sons, and Be Men": Masculinity in The Book of Mormon 16: Zachary McLeod Hutchins: "I Lead the Way, like Columbus": Joseph Smith, Genocide, and Revelatory Ambiguity 17: Edward Whitley: Book of Mormon Poetry

"This volume of essays succeeds in demonstrating to secular scholars that the Book of Mormon is a supremely valuable object with which to study many of the central themes of nineteenth-century American life. But it also succeeds and showing faithful, but perhaps bored, Latter-day Saints that there is much more to the Book of Mormon than meets the Sunday school eye." -- Zachary Davis, The Journal of Mormon History "...there is little denying the importance of the larger impression that each essay leaves when read as part of an interlocking whole. Upon completion the reader should leave fully convinced that the record that Smith claimed to unearth yet has many things to reveal regarding its own complexity as a literary text, as well as insights into the culture of 19th-century America." -- Spencer Wells, Southern Utah University, Reading Religion

Selling point: Collects the most impressive of scholars ever assembled to address The Book of Mormon Selling point: Engages with the text from a wide variety of disciplines, including literary studies, American history, anthropology, and religious studies Selling point: Provides a broad perspective on a text of unquestionable historical significance, via accomplished scholars of American literature and culture

Elizabeth Fenton is Associate Professor of English at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Religious Liberties: Anti-Catholicism and Liberal Democracy in Nineteenth-Century US Literature and Culture (Oxford, 2011). Jared Hickman is Associate Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Black Prometheus: Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery (Oxford, 2016) and co-editor (with Martha Schoolman) of Abolitionist Places (Routledge, 2016).

Selling point: Collects the most impressive of scholars ever assembled to address The Book of Mormon Selling point: Engages with the text from a wide variety of disciplines, including literary studies, American history, anthropology, and religious studies Selling point: Provides a broad perspective on a text of unquestionable historical significance, via accomplished scholars of American literature and culture