The Gospel According to the Novelist: Religious Scripture and Contemporary Fiction

Description

Why have so many prominent literary authors-from Philip Pullman and Jose Saramago to Michele Roberts and Colm Toibim-recently rewritten the canonical story of Jesus Christ? What does that say about our supposedly secular age? In this insightful study, Magdalena Maczynska defines and examines the genre of scriptural metafiction: novels that not only transform religious texts but also draw attention to these transformations. In addition to providing rich examples and close readings, Maczynska positions literary studies within interdisciplinary debates about religion and secularity. Her book demonstrates a surprising turn of events: even as contemporary novelists deconstruct the traditional categories of "secular" and "sacred" writing, they open up new spaces for scripture in contemporary culture.

Magdalena Maczynska is Associate Professor at Marymount Manhattan College, USA

Maczynska provides an impressive survey of works of biblical reinvention from a wide range of novelists ... The strength of this study is in the breadth of its coverage, and its argument that the Gospel stories are important cultural artefacts regardless of religious faith. * The Journal of Religious History, Literature and Culture * Maczynska (Marymount Manhattan College) offers a valuable overview of mostly contemporary novels that she calls scriptural metafictions-i.e., works that overturn traditional interpretations of scriptural stories in order to transform them in the same way that Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses offers fictional revisions of the Muslim canon. For example, Maczynska is compelling in arguing that Jose Saramago's The Gospel according to Jesus Christ and Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ reject the resurrection and the good news, and reconsider the Christian canon from a postmodern point of view. 'Rarely has impiety appeared so respectable,' Maczynska writes. She considers multiple other voices producing 'alternative point-of-view gospels,' works such as Michele Roberts's The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene; Colm Toibin's The Testament of Mary; Christopher Moore's Lamb: The Gospel according to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal; Nino Ricci's Testament; Gore Vidal's Live from Golgotha (and various other various science-fiction treatments); and James C. Carse's The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple, which offers multiple interpretations of Jesus. All of these authors consider scripture a construct open to bold reimagining, and Maczynska concludes that their work reveals a postmodern understanding of the slipperiness of language and the 'power structures that shape every act of writing and reading.' Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. -- J. P. Baumgaertner, Wheaton College, USA * CHOICE *