BUNYAN'S SECULAR ALLEGORY

Crawford, Jason. "Bunyan's Secular Allegory." To what extent is The Pilgrim's Progress an experiment in allegorical fiction? To what extent is it an experiment in secular fiction? And in what ways do these two broad categories, allegorical and secular, negotiate with each other in John Bunyan's early modern visionary narrative? Commentators on The Pilgrim's Progress tend to assume that allegorical and secular are simply opposing terms, for which reason many readings of Bunyan place him somewhere along the road from a pre-modern allegorical culture to a modern secular one. But this essay situates Bunyan's fiction in the processes by which allegorical language and cultural secularization irrupt into, exert pressure against, and arise out of one another. By attending closely to Bunyan's negotiations between the language of subjectivity and the language of scripture, the essay proposes that he fashions allegory as an idiom for the secular subject and, conversely, that his peculiar form of modern subjectivity has allegory at its heart.