{"product_id":"fictions-of-god-raphael-magarik-9780226842233","title":"Fictions of God: English Renaissance Literature and the Invention of the Biblical Narrator","description":"\u003cb\u003eA new history of literary narration rooted in the turmoil of the Protestant Reformation.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e We often identify secularization's characteristic literary form as the modern novel: out with divine scripture, in with human fictions. In \u003ci\u003eFictions of God\u003c\/i\u003e, 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eFictions of God\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Raphael Magarik\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 0226842231\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9780226842233\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e University of Chicago Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 11\/19\/2025\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 272\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback","brand":"Raphael Magarik","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":46927735783679,"sku":"9780226842233","price":30.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_5bd370e7-2a43-49d5-96a8-79ecf46a9dd0.jpg?v=1749372802","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/fictions-of-god-raphael-magarik-9780226842233","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}