A recent post on GetReligion.org about Mitt Romney and Stephenie Meyer prompted these thoughts:
The attraction of the Latter-day Saint imagination both to the Young Adult fiction genre and to speculative fiction has been a focus of the academic study of Mormon literary culture well before Twilight. For a summary of Mormon Young Adult fiction (successful both in the niche LDS market and nationally), see my blog post (http://bit.ly/seDRj). In teaching the Literature of the Latter-day Saints at Brigham Young University, I account for this affinity to adolescent literature by relating the Mormon concept of eternal progression to the bildungsroman literary tradition (the coming of age novel). Joseph Smith himself authored a spiritual autobiography that can be considered in this tradition.
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