1st Edition

White Roses on the Floor of Heaven Nature and Flower Imagery in Latter-Day Saints Women's Literature, 1880-1920

By Susanna Morrill Copyright 2006
    254 Pages
    by Routledge

    254 Pages
    by Routledge

    First published in 2006. This volume marks the tenth volume in its series: Religion in History, Society and Culture. This series is designed to bring exciting new work by young scholars on religion to a wider audience. Susanna Morrill offers here a fine and sensitive reading of the little known, and often simply caricatured, history of the religious lives of Mormon women at the turn of the twentieth century. She reads the extensive use of flower imagery in poetry and other writing by these women as a species of lay theologizing—a way that LDS women elaborated and celebrated the latent female symbolism within a still young and incomplete religious system.

    Introduction  1. The Wider Cultural Context and the Mormon Sources  2. The Adoption and Adaptation of Nature and Flower Imagery by Mormon Women Writers: The Theological and Institutional Context  3. The Adoption and Adaptation of Nature and Flower Imagery by Mormon Women Writers: The Cultural Context  4. Femaleness, Nature, and Virtue: A Triangle of Theological Meaning  5. Motherhood and the Home in the Theology of Nature and Flower Imagery  6. Suffering Women and the Theodicy of Nature and Flower Imagery  Conclusion  Bibliography  Index

    Biography

    Susanna Morrill is currently Assistant Professor in the Religious Studies Department of Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She has contributed articles to The Encyclopedia of American Religion and Politics and also was a selector and reviewer of websites for Britannica.com.