Playing Pilgrims: Adapting Bunyan for Children

• Published in: Bunyan studies no. 18; p. 78
• Main Author: Murray, Shannon
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Newcastle Upon Tyne Northumbria University, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences 01.01.2014
• Subjects: Alcott, Louisa May (1832-1888); American literature; British & Irish literature; Bunyan, John (1628-1688); Children; English literature
• ISSN: 0954-0970

Expanding on Hutcheon's discussion of adaptation, Julie Sanders makes a distinction between adaptation and appropriation: while adaptation signals its origins and depends on its relationship with the original, appropriation is a more subversive act, breaking away from the original to form a new cultural product.8 For both Sanders and Hutcheon, part of the audience's pleasure comes from knowing the original and seeing both the familiar and the new in the adaptation. Because neither Sanders nor Hutcheon is looking at what happens when a work is adapted for another audience, however, they miss two things that will be important to this study. [...]many overlap, so at the same time as A.L.O.E. is arguing that children must be restrained in their reading, a preface to the edition illustrated by Edwart Wehnert (also 1860) calls the book 'overlaid with repetition and conversations about questions of doctrine which children cannot possible understand; ... no young people can ever read the whole book throughout without being wearied'. First published 1890. Hofmyer traces the movement of The Pilgrim's Progress from its origin in the seventeenth century through the evangelical colonizing of Africa, a move that often sees the producers of the adaptations and translations - and occasionally the distributers - as separate from the audience they intend. 10 Sarah M. Smedman's selected bibliography of adaptations of Gulliver's Travels identifies the Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World (London: Stone and King, 1727) as the earliest children's adaptation of that book, and Newbery's children's version of Tom Jones was first published in 1795; see 'Like Me, Like Me Not: Gulliver's Travels as Children's Book', in The Genres of Gulliver's Travels, ed.