John Bunyan’s Imaginary Writings in Context

<p>Within the last half-century early scholarly approaches and analysis of John Bunyan’s <i>Pilgrim’s Progress</i> have seen siginificant advances in mandating and enabling a more contextualized view of Bunyan’s <i>oeuvre</i>. Utilizing this fresh examination of context <i>John Bunyan’s Imaginary Writings in Context</i> explores Bunyan’s writings in a double context: his fictional works vis-à-vis his own non-fictional writings and his fictional writings in the context of written materials by other authors – books tracts spiritual biographies and poems available to Bunyan. This volumepresents these recent developments by blurring the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction between literature and history and in the case of Bunyan between imaginative literatures in fiction and theological writing. Moreover this book aims to delineate the imaginary world underlying Bunyan’s fictional writings by viewing Bunyan’s own fictional works in tandem with his non-fiction writings. Simultaneously it situates aspects of Bunyan’s fiction in the context of writings available to him whether these be Holy Scripture religious tracts by other authors or ballads and short texts current in the wider culture of the time.</p>