John Bunyans Imaginary Writings in Context

Within the last half-century, early scholarly approaches and analysis of John Bunyans Pilgrims Progress have seen siginificant advances in mandating and enabling a more contextualized view of Bunyans oeuvre. Utilizing this fresh examination of context, John Bunyans Imaginary Writings in Context explores Bunyans writings in a double context: his fictional works vis- -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 Bunyans fictional writings by viewing Bunyans own fictional works in tandem with his non-fiction writings. Simultaneously it situates aspects of Bunyans 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.