A01=Raphael Magarik
Author_Raphael Magarik
biblical reception
Category=DSB
Category=DSBC
Category=QR
Category=QRAX
Category=QRMF1
Category=QRVC
English Renaissance
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
immanent critique
literature
narratology
Paradise Lost
Protestant Reformation
religion
secularization
Product details
- ISBN 9780226842233
- Weight: 399g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 19 Nov 2025
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
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.
Raphael Magarik is assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago.
