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Fictions of God
English Renaissance Literature and the Invention of the Biblical Narrator
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Raphael Magarik
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2025
About this book
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.
Author / Editor information
Raphael Magarik is assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago.
Reviews
“Fictions of God is a bold work of scholarship that reenergizes—and should transform—the study of the Bible and literature. Magarik’s prose is as lively as it is learned, and the provocative ambition of his argument, that Protestant commentators invented the biblical narrator, makes this book not only fun to read but essential for anyone interested in religion, secularization, and literary modes of discipline and critique. I learned something on every page and will be grappling with the profound implications of this work for years to come.”
— Constance Furey, Indiana University“Writing as both a literary scholar and an intellectual historian, Magarik proposes a compelling revision of how the emergence of secularism in the early modern period is understood. Surprisingly but persuasively, he shows the seeds of secularism in Protestant biblical commentary and then in English poetic treatments of the Bible, as readers of the Bible saw in the text unreliable narrators, irony, and even free indirect discourse. This book offers a fresh perspective on the early modern period.”
— Robert Alter, University of California, BerkeleyTopics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
vii - I. COMMENTARY
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1 God Does the Prophets in Different Voices
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2 Luther's Free Indirect Revelation
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3 Ralegh's Secular Digressions
55 - II NARRATIVE
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4 Cowley's "Seeming to Suppose"
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5 Milton's "Truth Shall Retire"
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6 Hutchinson's "Fictions of God"
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7 The Death of the Biblical Narrator
170 -
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Acknowledgments
179 -
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Notes
183 -
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Index
247
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
November 12, 2025
eBook ISBN:
9780226842226
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9780226842226
Keywords for this book
English Renaissance; secularization; narratology; Paradise Lost; biblical reception; Protestant Reformation; immanent critique; religion; literature
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
