John Bunyan: Reading Dissenting Writing

This collection of twelve essays adopts a variety of critical and theoretical approaches to explore the range of John Bunyan's fictional and non-fictional writing within the cultural, religious and political context of the later seventeenth century. Drawing on original research, they throw fresh light on Bunyan's relationship to such Puritan contemporaries as Richard Baxter and John Milton, on the material circumstances of the presentation and publication of Bunyan's texts, and on the cultural, literary and intellectual contexts of his writing. The result is a book which challenges received orthodoxies and opens up new lines of enquiry in the study of this key figure in our literary history.