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"As blood is forced out of flesh": Spontaneity and the Wounds of Exchange in Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim's Progress
- ELH
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 74, Number 2, Summer 2007
- pp. 271-299
- 10.1353/elh.2007.0010
- Article
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A full third of Grace Abounding recounts one traumatic experience: a voice coaxing Bunyan for over a year to "Sell him," to sell Christ, "for this or that." Criticism has ignored the economic form of this episode. I argue that in it we see the symptom of an early modern religious subjectivity coming to understand itself in evidentiary, economic terms; "Sell him" marks the incommensurability between economic logic and personal relation. Where criticism has long recognized the relationship between Grace Abounding and Pilgrim's Progress as "creative reworking," I argue that Pilgrim's Progress relieves the particular wounds described in Grace Abounding.