Book Review: John Bunyan's Imaginary Writings in Context by Nancy Rosenfeld. New York/Abingdon: Routledge, 2018

• Published in: Bunyan studies no. 23; pp. 99 - 103
• Main Author: Camden, Vera J
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Newcastle Upon Tyne Northumbria University, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences 01.01.2019
• Subjects: Allegory; Authorship; Bunyan, John (1628-1688); Children; Context; Culture; Dialogue; Donne, John (1572-1631); English language; English literature; Families & family life; Fathers; Forster, E M (1879-1970); Genre; Heroism & heroes; Investigations; Literary characters; Literary devices; Literature; Metaphor; Narratives; Novels; Readers; Realism; Spirituality; Websites; Writers
• ISSN: 0954-0970

Rosenfeld thus selects those aspects of Bunyan's oeuvre that seem to reflect his development as a father of the novel, while drawing into her consideration a variety of printed works of other writers to provide a literary historical context for Bunyan's writings. [...]she configures a variety of contemporary works that might have been read - or might have been heard of - by Bunyan, because 'in order to view Bunyan's writings as predictive of the future fictional genre (the novel), it is useful to draw connections between his writings [...] and elements of the wider culture in which he functions' (p. 8). To this end, she frequently draws upon E. M. Forster's definition of 'round' and 'flat' characters to describe the ways that the 'blood-red colour' of Bunyan's characterization (p. 212, a phrase cited from Bunyan's description of Vanity Fair) draws from his experience of English village and small-town life, and rings true in dialogue and depiction, only to blur the lines between allegory and realism under the incipient demands of an emerging genre. [...]in continuing to use unselfconsciously such metaphorical constructs, many based on the human life cycle and family relationships, we also continue many of the problems which have left us unsatisfied with the monumental, authoritative [literary] histories of our predecessors. Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature (1996), 17-40) Treating the radical Puritan - 'a tinker and a poor man' - as if his goal as a writer were to father and foster the great English novel through texts that behave, as Ezell puts it, 'like children in model families' runs the risk of justifying the study of Bunyan predominantly in terms of the literature that came after him.