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Raphael Magarik will discuss "Fictions of God: English Renaissance Literature and the Invention of the Biblical Narrator." He will be joined in conversation by Timothy Harrison. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion. At the Co-op.
About the book: 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.
About the author: Raphael Magarik is assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago; in addition to his scholarly work, he has written popularly for outlets like The New Republic and Jacobin; he is a contributing writer at Jewish Currents.
About the interlocutor: Timothy Harrison is Associate Professor of English and in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He is the author of "Coming To: Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England" (U Chicago Press, 2020) and "John Donne's Physics" (2024).
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Event Venue
5751 S Woodlawn Ave, Chicago, IL, United States, Illinois 60637
Tickets
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