The Gospel According to the Novelist

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 Jos© 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.
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