Fictions of God: English Renaissance Literature and the Invention of the Biblical Narrator (Class 200: New Studies in Religion)

Synopsis

A new history of literary narration rooted in the turmoil of the Protestant Reformation. We often identify secularization's characteristic literary form as the modern novel: out with divine scripture, in with human fictions. In Fictions of God, Raphael Magarik argues that this story overlooks the cultural upheavals of the Protestant Reformation. Early reformers imagined a Bible that was neither infallible nor inerrant but fictional, composed by a divine counterfactual: God crafted the text, they said, as if it had been written by the prophets. Early modern Protestants now found in their Bibles not a source of foundational truths but a model for unreliable narration, even fiction. Fictions of God traces how this approach to literature passed from biblical commentators to poets like Abraham Cowley, John Milton, and Lucy Hutchinson amid the violent emergence of a new religious and political order—long before the eighteenth-century rise of the English novel. The result is a transformative account of the Reformation’s effect on imaginative literature and the secularization of the Bible itself.

Copyright:

2025

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9780226842233

Related ISBNs:

9780226842219

Publisher:

University of Chicago Press

Date of Addition:

11/19/25

Copyrighted By:

The University of Chicago

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

History, Nonfiction, Literature and Fiction, Religion and Spirituality, Education, Language Arts

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.