Pilgrim's Progress and the Book

This essay reexamines the literary-historical situation of The Pilgrim's Progress, part one and two, in light of recent work on its transnational reception history by Isabel Hofmeyr. The way African writers have used Pilgrim's Progress turns out to be deeply analogous to the way Bunyan uses the Bible. The book, scroll, and letters that appear in Pilgrim's Progress work together to disclose three interrelated circuits of literacy--moral, legal, domestic--operating in late-seventeenth-century conceptions of "the Book." Bunyan combines these circuits, none simply religious or secular, to make his fiction an entertainment, in this world, of the world to come.