Visions in a Seer Stone: Joseph Smith and the Making of the Book of Mormon

In Visions in a Seer Stone, Davis makes a significant contribution to the growing field of study surrounding early Mormon texts by resituating its central book as well as several other of Joseph Smith's writings within contemporaneous sermon culture, offering a useful way to think critically about "sleepy" elements like repetition and the use of outlines as compositional strategies more closely tied to religious oratory than print works. [...]Davis attunes the twenty-first-century scholar to a nineteenth-century readership, one that was saturated by these oral forms, an audience for whom these vestigial structures of oral composition that remain in the text would be readily recognizable. "The text of the Book of Mormon," Davis writes, "reveals how the pervasive sermon culture of Smith's world had firmly imprinted itself on his imagination, influencing the style, organization, and content of his prophetic voice" (89). (Because of this focus, I believe the short and awkwardly placed first chapter on Western esotericism would serve the work better if integrated into this later discussion.) In Davis's theory, translation is understood as a process that includes communion with the Holy Ghost but is not exclusive of the translator's own active intervention.