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Monday, August 20, 2018

The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) by John Bunyan


Book Review
The Pilgrim's Progress (1678)
by John Bunyan

   The Pilgrim's Progress is another consistent contender for "first novel;" though that status in recent years has suffered because the Christian themes are so thoroughly out of date with the bulk of academics and critics who opine on such matters.  A more recent, and perhaps more accurate assessment is that The Piligrim's Progress was the first "best seller" in terms of a mass-produced work of prose allegory(if not a novel)  which captured the attention of the then reading public, which, in the mid to late 17th century, was very interested in religious tracts.  Religious tracts do in fact comprise a large segment of the first centuries out put of what today we would call "popular culture" and as you go back in time towards the Renaissance and Middle Ages, the segment stretches to close to 100%.  Popular culture was religious culture, and non-religious culture was treated with suspicion.

  The introduction of the Reformation and it's suite of associated ideas that strongly involved people reading and thinking for themselves gave direct rise to both authors, fired by the religious ideas of the day, and an audience of literate folks interested in the subject.  Since The Pilgrim's Progress is generally considered to be the first novel-like book to fire the imagination of a popular, English language audience, the description of it as the "first novel" isn't totally wrong.

  Unfortunately, none of that makes this book enjoyable, and at 300 pages, it is not brief.  The entirely allegorical story involves a man named Christian who travels from the city of despair to the celestial kingdom, and presumably it appealed to people at a time when someone writing a work of straight fiction would probably be taken to task for lying- a criticism that lasted for centuries through the early history of the novel.  The second part involves the same trip made by Christian's wife and children.   Along with John Lyly's Anatomy of Wit, The Pilgrim's Progress the least readable of all the books in the 1001 Books project, and it doesn't surprise me that it was dropped from the first revised list in 2008.

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