Reception, Appropriation, Recollection

The ten essays that make up this volume are drawn from papers delivered at the fourth triennial conference of the International John Bunyan Society. A theme of the conference was the extraordinary reception history of The Pilgrim's Progress: how it has been translated, adapted, illustrated and read within different cultures over the past three centuries. As contributors here demonstrate, Bunyan's book has influenced in sometimes unexpected ways writers as diverse as Dickens, George Eliot, Charles Kingsley, Mary Ward, William Hale White, Louis MacNeice and Samuel Beckett. Through the agency of missionary translators it circulated internationally, and in the process was transformed and read in a wide variety of ways by different groups of readers. Romantic critics including Southey, Scott and Macaulay established it as a 'classic' text, but illustrators, editors and publishers also figured importantly in the process of its literary canonisation. Bunyan even made a brief appearance in one of the most famous films of the Second World War, Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death. What the volume as a whole reveals is the extraordinary influence of The Pilgrim's Progress and its continuing capacity to inspire the imagination of all kinds of readers.

Autorentext

The Editors: W. R. Owens is Professor of English Literature at The Open University.
Stuart Sim is Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Sunderland.

Zusammenfassung
"(...) this book has great value as an aid to the epistemology of scholarship." (Noam Reisner, Year's Work in English Studies)

Inhalt
Contents: W. R. Owens/Stuart Sim: Introduction Vincent Newey: Bunyan's Afterlives: Case Studies David Walker: Bunyan's Reception in the Romantic Period Norman Vance: Pilgrims Abounding: Bunyan and the Victorian Novel Nathalie Collé-Bak: The Role of Illustrations in the Reception of The Pilgrim's Progress Mary Hammond: The Pilgrim's Progress and its Nineteenth-Century Publishers Isabel Hofmeyr: Evangelical Realism: The Transnational Making of Genre in The Pilgrim's Progress Richard Danson Brown: Everyman's Progresses: Louis MacNeice's Dialogues with Bunyan Julie Campbell: 'A Mighty Maze of Walks': Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and Beckett's Molloy Michael Davies: The Relevant Pilgrim: John Bunyan in A Matter of Life and Death Stuart Sim: Bunyan and his Fundamentalist Readers.