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1 results

  • Chapter 6 - Traveling Papers: Pilgrim’s Progress and the Book

  • from Part III - Uses of Scripture for Fiction
  • Kevin Seidel, Eastern Mennonite University, Virginia
  • Book:
    Rethinking the Secular Origins of the Novel
    Published online:
    16 March 2021
    Print publication:
    25 March 2021, pp 157-178

  • Summary

    Chapter 6 traces the appearance of the Bible as a series of legal or forensic documents (book, scroll, certificate) in part one of Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and then as a series of entertaining things (food, digestive, mirror) in part two (1684). The shift in appearance from legal document to entertaining thing shows Bunyan’s fiction moving through channels already carved out by the circulation of the scriptures in late-seventeenth-century England: a literary channel in which the Bible was held to be the supreme book of wisdom; a legal channel in which the Bible was used to justify state authority; and a domestic channel in which the Bible was used to speak the language of intimacy. This chapter also touches on writing about the Bible by John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Mary Rowlandson to show how Bunyan uses scripture not to imagine life-after-death in the Celestial City but life on the outskirts of that City, here in this world.