How does a book become an international bestseller? What happens to it as it is translated into different languages, contexts, and societies? How is it changed by the intellectual environments it encounters? What does the transnational circulation mean for its reception back home? Exploring the international life of a particularly long-lived and widely traveled book, Isabel Hofmeyr follows The Pilgrim's Progress as it circulates through multiple contexts--and into some 200 languages--focusing on Africa, where 80 of the translations occurred. This feat of literary history is based on intensive research that criss-crossed among London, Georgia, Kingston, Bedford (John Bunyan's hometown), and much of sub-Saharan Africa. Finely written and unusually wide-ranging, it accounts for how The Pilgrim's Progress traveled abroad with the Protestant mission movement, was adapted and reworked by the societies into which it traveled, and, finally, how its circulation throughout the empire affected Bunyan's standing back in England. The result is a new intellectual approach to Bunyan--one that weaves together British, African, and Caribbean history with literary and translation studies and debates over African Christianity and mission. Even more important, this book is a rare example of a truly worldly study of "world literature"--and of the critical importance of translation, both linguistic and cultural.

The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan is the most extensive volume of original essays ever published on the seventeenth-century nonconformist preacher and writer, John Bunyan. Its thirty-eight chapters examine Bunyan's life and works, their religious and historical contexts, and the critical reception of his writings, in particular his allegorical narrative, The Pilgrim's Progress. Interdisciplinary and comprehensive, it provides unparalleled scope and expertise, ranging from literary theory to religious history and from theology to post-colonial criticism. The Handbook is structured in four sections. The first, 'Contexts', deals with the historical Bunyan in relation to various aspects of his life, background, and work as a nonconformist: from basic facts of biography to the nature of his church at Bedford, his theology, and the religious and political cultures of seventeenth-century Dissent. Part 2 considers Bunyan's literary output: from his earliest printed tracts to his posthumously published works. Offering discrete chapters on Bunyan's major works - Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), The Pilgrim's Progress, Parts I and II (1678; 1684); The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680), and The Holy War (1682) - this section nevertheless covers Bunyan's oeuvre in its entirety: controversial and pastoral, narrative and poetic. Section 3, 'Directions in Criticism', engages with Bunyan in literary critical terms, focusing on his employment of form and language and on theoretical approaches to his writings: from psychoanalytic to post-secular criticism. Section 4, 'Journeys', tackles some of the ways in which Bunyan's works, and especially The Pilgrim's Progress, have travelled throughout the world since the late seventeenth century, assessing Bunyan's place within key literary periods and their distinctive developments: from the eighteenth-century novel to the writing of 'empire'.

A comprehensive introduction to Bunyan's life and works, examining their place in the broader context of seventeenth-century history and literature.

First published in 1997, this volume is an attempt to prise open the name of John Bunyan. It aims to examine the operations of that name, to explore the discursive techniques which produced the figure of this author, both in the seventeenth century and later, and to identify the different meanings which have been ascribed to it in the history of its production. It may be read as a ‘Dear John’ letter to the author, or as an exercise in cultural materialism which examines the production and reproduction of a particular figure of authority, the author, within specific cultural formations at different historical moments.

This volume of original essays is designed to be of interest to students not only of Bunyan, but of the history, religion and literature of the seventeenth century

Within the last half-century, early scholarly approaches and analysis of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress have seen siginificant advances in mandating and enabling a more contextualized view of Bunyan’s oeuvre. Utilizing this fresh examination of context, John Bunyan’s Imaginary Writings in Context 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.