Jonathan…My point in saying that religious themes obscured the native Romanticism in Parley’s writing was simply an observation that nearly all of Parley’s mature writing was religious in nature; that is, written in support of a specific religious agenda. The visibility of Romantic themes in his writing (nature, emotion, etc.) declined as Pratt moved forward with his career and wrote almost exclusively in a apostolic/religious mode. Interestingly, some of these reemerge in the Autobiography, where Pratt works to present himself, not Mormonism per se.

Ben P….I don’t know that Mormonism held on to Romantic thought any longer than other Americans, but it’s certain that Romanticism continued much longer in America than Britain. I tend to think that Americans in the West were insulated from the latest literary developments – they were a little behind the literary times.

My perception is sort of. Romanticism seems to persist longer in all of the ethnic/national literatures that were coming to awareness in the latter part of the 19th century. Literary immortality, after all, was a way to prove the value of the indigenous culture and Romanticism was a useful way to go about it since the materials at hand were generally folk materials.