at the University of Utah in a course on "The English Bible as Literature." My subject is profane literature, imaginative literature, specifically contemporary Mormon imaginative literature in which, as far as life's dearest values are concerned, the sacred and the secular are not opposed but in a strong embrace. I wish to inquire how the Mormon experience, however framed by belief, finds literary expression, not in the revealed or Authorized Word but in the conscious artistry of self-ordained writers who treat their craft as their vocation and give it the respect such a calling deserves. They are Mormondom's truthsayers, not prophets, seers, and revelators in any theological sense, but storytellers, the shamans every people with a tradition sooner or later begets, and a chief article of their literaryfaith is that they are at once autonomous and accountableautonomous in choosing their subject and accountable to their art in developing it. They write with an eye neither on the market nor on Church approval. In short, they are not "hired hands," Wayne Carver's term for writers in the service of some cause without an authentic voice of their own (70).

The poets, playwrights, and prose writers (the novelists, short story writers, and essayists) coming out of the Mormon experience, even marginally, assume what I would call the burden of a Mormon literature, with "burden" suggesting both obligation and opportunity. Yale historian C. Vann Woodward's classic work The Burden of Southern History (1960) affords a suggestive parallel in its examination of the neuroses and nostalgia of a society in