Pilgrim's Progress as literature

[marina1978]

Hi everyone.
Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is known to be a great piece of literature. But it seems to me it has more to do with theology than literature.
One of my daughters told me it used several literary devices that were later to be used by Defoe. I have never spotted them.
What do you think about this question?
I would be eager to know to what extent the Progress is a literary text as I always thought is was only religious.

Marina

[dfloyd]

by John Bunyan while serving a jail sentence for performing religious services outside of the sanctioned Church of England. It initially served as an allegorical work for protestantism, but has long been thought of as a classic work of literature since only the most naive would regard it as a religious tract today. It is contemporary (or nearly so) with Defoe's novels and uses Defoe's literary device of verisimilitude where by the novel appears to have a lifelike setting. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Journal of a Plague Year all use the literary technique of making the narrator seemingly tell a factual story. What seemed highly religious in the seventeenth century is not true of today;s readers, and the work has never been out of print, becoming a literary classic in many libraries and taught in literature classes.

[L.M. The Third]

Not having read Defoe, I really wouldn't know where the similarities there come in. One old edition that I gave away had an introduction calling PP "the first (English?) novel". That's probably stretching it a bit, especially if you take out the qualification of English, since Don Quixote would probably rank as the first significant literary novel.

(Speaking of DQ though, I have to blame The Pilgrim's Progress for my own quixotic attitudes towards battling one-eyed giants and fire-spewing dragons with a two-edged sword. I practically grew up on an audio version of the book and, though I wasn't blind to the spiritual lessons, I developed something of an obsession with the tempestuous elements of Bunyan's world.)

On the other hand, as a Christian, every time I reread or listen to a portion, I see once more what a depth of spiritual understanding the tinker of Bedford had. And he placed it in such a well-crafted allegory that it has served as a base for other literary classics such as Jane Eyre.

I won't say that I think all the style of the story-telling is ideally consistent, but the story and the lessons it teaches have captivated generations of readers since it was first published. It's my opinion that the voice from Bedford jail will never be silenced, but will continue to influence lives and thinking to the end of time.

[marina1978]

Thank you for giving these details about verisimilitude and embedded story-telling. It is precious for me as I like to have clear details as to book studying, which is one of my favorite pastimes!

I agree that it is a wonderfully crafted allegory, I grew up in France, in a country where Bunyan is not popular at all, mainly because not too many people read English well enough an probably also because people are mainly catholics. But the discovery of Bunyan was a major event in my life. Oh and I've also watched an animated film and listened to an audio book about the PP!

Actually, I find it very difficult to say what is literature and what is theology and why in the PP (and in general also, of course, it seems to me one of the most difficult points in literature!)
You know, defining literary style, what makes the "style" of Bunyan so interesting, what makes the modernity of the book.
As to the modernity, I would say that it is the use of fiction as a support for a religious allegory, knowing that calvinists were really opposed to the use of fiction as they thought distraction implied to forget God.

[The Comedian]

It's interesting to see a thread started on this book. I've just checked it out and plan to start it later this week. I've wanted to read it for a while -- it seems so influential to many writers. . . . .

[Venerable Bede]

I read Pilgrim's Progress back when I was around ten or eleven. Of course, quite a bit of the theology and allegory went over my head but I still got a lot out of it.

About whether it is literature or not, I don't think there really can be much of an argument. Countless works of fiction push agendas about politics, religion, society, etc. yet they are unquestionably literature. Pilgrim's Progress has a strong Christian agenda, but that hardly discredits it as literature.

[marina1978]

So, here is the big question. What are the criterions to define a text as literature?
I have no answer to that yet.
Is it writing with "a proper style"? Inscribing your work in a genre? The use of literary devices?

By the way, to the comedian who plans on reading it, you should definitely! And reading Grace Abounding will enrich your reading of the first, even though GA is more difficult to read!