John Bunyan and the Language of Conviction

John Bunyan and the Language of Conviction PDF Author: Beth Lynch
Publisher: DS Brewer
ISBN: 9781843840176
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Bunyan's works re-evaluated, and considered in their Restoration and non-conformist context. This book undertakes a major reassessment of the works of John Bunyan [1628-88], the nonconformist author of The Pilgrim's Progress, who was imprisoned for preaching his beliefs. Through a reading of each of his narratives, and many of his pastoral writings, both in textual detail and in relation to the various traditions - such as Reformed spirituality and the nonconformist trial - within which he lived, preached, and wrote, the author offers a systematic re-evaluation of Bunyan's development as an author. She presents new perspectives on his most popular works, Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim's Progress, whilst arguing that the significance of the lesser-known Life and Death of Mr Badman and The Holy War has been severely underestimated; and she shows how overall the works offer a candid document of nonconformist experience in the Restoration period.

John Bunyan and the Language of Conviction

John Bunyan and the Language of Conviction PDF Author: Beth Lynch
Publisher: DS Brewer
ISBN: 9781843840176
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Bunyan's works re-evaluated, and considered in their Restoration and non-conformist context. This book undertakes a major reassessment of the works of John Bunyan [1628-88], the nonconformist author of The Pilgrim's Progress, who was imprisoned for preaching his beliefs. Through a reading of each of his narratives, and many of his pastoral writings, both in textual detail and in relation to the various traditions - such as Reformed spirituality and the nonconformist trial - within which he lived, preached, and wrote, the author offers a systematic re-evaluation of Bunyan's development as an author. She presents new perspectives on his most popular works, Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim's Progress, whilst arguing that the significance of the lesser-known Life and Death of Mr Badman and The Holy War has been severely underestimated; and she shows how overall the works offer a candid document of nonconformist experience in the Restoration period.

The Cambridge Companion to Bunyan

The Cambridge Companion to Bunyan PDF Author: Anne Dunan-Page
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521733081
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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

The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan

The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan PDF Author: Michael Davies
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191649457
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 760

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Book Description
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'.

The Rhetoric of Conversion in English Puritan Writing from Perkins to Milton

The Rhetoric of Conversion in English Puritan Writing from Perkins to Milton PDF Author: David Parry
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350165158
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This rhetorical study of the persuasive practice of English Puritan preachers and writers demonstrates how they appeal to both reason and imagination in order to persuade their hearers and readers towards conversion, assurance of salvation and godly living. Examining works from a diverse range of preacher-writers such as William Perkins, Richard Sibbes, Richard Baxter and John Bunyan, this book maps out continuities and contrasts in the theory and practice of persuasion. Tracing the emergence of Puritan allegory as an alternative, imaginative mode of rhetoric, it sheds new light on the paradoxical question of how allegories such as John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress came to be among the most significant contributions of Puritanism to the English literary canon, despite the suspicions of allegory and imagination that were endemic in Puritan culture. Concluding with reflections on how Milton deploys similar strategies to persuade his readers towards his idiosyncratic brand of godly faith, this book makes an original contribution to current scholarly conversations around the textual culture of Puritanism, the history of rhetoric, and the rhetorical character of theology.

New Testaments

New Testaments PDF Author: Michael Austin
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611493641
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, popular works of literature attracted--as they attract today--sequels, prequels, franchises, continuations, and parodies. Sequels of all kinds demonstrate the economic realities of the literary marketplace. This represents something fundamental about the way human beings process narrative information. We crave narrative closure, but we also resist its finality, making such closure both inevitable and inadequate in human narratives. Many cultures incorporate this fundamental ambiguity towards closure in the mythic frameworks that fuel their narrative imaginations. New Testaments: Cognition, Closure and the Figural Logic of the Sequel, 1660-1740 examines both the inevitability and the inadequacy of closure in the sequels to four major works of literature written in England between 1660 and 1740: Paradise Lost, The Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and Pamela. Each of these works spawned sequels, which--while often different from the original works--connected themselves through rhetorical strategies that can be loosely defined as figural. Such strategies came directly from the culture's two dominant religious narratives: the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible--two vastly dissimilar works seen universally as complementary parts of a unified and coherent narrative.

Histories that Mansoul and Her Wars Anatomize

Histories that Mansoul and Her Wars Anatomize PDF Author: Robert J. McKelvey
Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
ISBN: 3647569399
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Robert McKelvey argues that John Bunyan wrote The Holy War as a warfare allegory symbolizing the salvation history of Scripture from a Calvinistic-covenantal perspective. In this cosmic drama of redemption, the "Histories That Mansoul, and her Wars Anatomize" include the individual-soteric-microcosmic level or ordo salutis unfolding analogous to the redemptive-historical-macrocosmic level or historia salutis. The eternal covenant of redemption provides the foundation for this history of salvation, which progresses from creation to the anticipation of consummation. This scheme finds its roots in the Puritan philosophy of "universal history" which sees all historical events serving God's redemptive purposes. The individual, through union with Christ founded on election, participates in the drama by inclusion within the trans-historical covenant of grace. As a depiction of cosmic war, The Holy War sets forth the enmity between the church and Antichrist, which is representative of the greater battle between Christ and the devil from Genesis to Revelation. As a pastoral guide to persecuted saints, Bunyan retrospectively rehearses the history of redemption to grant comfort. In addition, he prospectively reveals the consummation of redemption to encourage perseverance and instil eschatological hope. This thesis is substantiated contextually through Bunyan's life and writings, historiographically by surveying the history of Holy War interpretation, pre-textually by examining the introduction to the allegory, and textually by analyzing the allegory itself.

Allegory and Enchantment

Allegory and Enchantment PDF Author: Jason Crawford
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191092118
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
What is modernity? Where are modernitys points of origin? Where are its boundaries? And what lies beyond those boundaries? Allegory and Enchantment explores these broad questions by considering the work of English writers at the threshold of modernity, and by considering,in particular, the cultural forms these writers want to leave behind. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, many English writers fashion themselves as engaged in breaking away from an array of old idols: magic, superstition, tradition, the sacramental, the medieval. Many of these writers persistently use metaphors of disenchantment, of awakening from a broken spell, to describe their self-consciously modern orientation toward a medieval past. And many of them associate that repudiated past with the dynamics and conventions of allegory. In the hands of the major English practitioners of allegorical narrativeWilliam Langland, John Skelton, Edmund Spenser, and John Bunyanallegory shows signs of strain and disintegration. The work of these writers seems to suggest a story of modern emergence in which medieval allegory, with its search for divine order in the material world, breaks down under the pressure of modern disenchantment. But these four early modern writers also make possible other understandings of modernity. Each of them turns to allegory as a central organizing principle for his most ambitious poetic projects. Each discovers in the ancient forms of allegory a vital, powerful instrument of disenchantment. Each of them, therefore, opens up surprising possibilities: that allegory and modernity are inescapably linked; that the story of modern emergence is much older than the early modern period; and that the things modernity has tried to repudiatethe old enchantmentsare not as alien, or as absent, as they seem.

Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners ...

Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners ... PDF Author: John Bunyan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Christianity (Personal)
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description


Works of John Bunyan — Complete

Works of John Bunyan — Complete PDF Author: John Bunyan
Publisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 4808

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Book Description
This book will enrich your knowledge of John Bunyan and the times he lived in. The book was written after an enormous amount of research and study and covers John Bunyan's life from lowly beginnings through his conversion to Christianity and onto his writing and creating his most famous work, The Pilgrims Progress.

Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World

Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World PDF Author: Kathleen Lynch
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019163641X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Autobiographical narrative is seldom viewed as a catalyst for the social and political upheavals of mid-seventeenth-century England and its colonies. Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World argues that it should be. Focusing on the inward search for signs of election as a powerful stimulus for new, written forms of self-identification, this study directs critical attention toward the collective processes through which 'truthful' texts of spiritual experience were constructed, validated, and endorsed. This new analysis of the rhetoric of authentic selfhood emphasizes the ways in which personal accounts of religious awakening became another opportunity to conceptualize experience as an authorizing principle. A broad spectrum of Protestant life-writing is explored, from Augustine's Confessions, first translated into English in 1620, through John Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666) and Richard Baxter's Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696). The forms in which these landmark texts were circulated and the interests that those circulations served are examined in such a way as to put canonical texts back into conversation with the outpouring of individual life writings that dates from the middle of the 17th century on. As the first new historicized account of the seventeenth-century Protestant conversion narrative in a generation, Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World contributes to the reintegration of the scholarly fields of literature, religion, and politics. It revitalizes the study of proto-literary forms which, while devotional in nature, were deeply political in their consequences, contributing as they did to the emerging discourse of personal liberties.