The Pilgrim's Progress: An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Critcism

As featured on PBS’s The Great American Read

John Bunyan was a Baptist preacher and author with little education but much vision and purpose.

Briefly imprisoned for preaching without a license, he is believed to have begun writing the most famous Christian allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress, while in jail. The Pilgrim’s Progress was published in 1678 (Part I) and 1684 (Part II). Edited and annotated with the student reader in mind, this Norton Critical Edition is the indispensable guide to the language, allusions, and historical references of this challenging text. An unusually rich “Contexts” section is thematically organized in four sections: “Biographical,” “Geographical and Visual,” “Theological and Literary,” and “Abridgements and Adaptation,” and includes eleven essential visuals. “Criticism” collects twenty major essays spanning two hundred years of thinking and writing about The Pilgrim’s Progress, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, George Bernard Shaw, F. R. Leavis, Dorothy Van Ghent, J. Paul Hunter, Stanley Fish, Barbara A. Johnson, and Cynthia Wall, among others. 10 illustrations; 1 map

Cynthia Wall is Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Prose of Things: The Transformation of Description in the Eighteenth Century and The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London. She is editor of Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock (Bedford), Daniel Defoe's The Journal of the Plague Year (Penguin), The Concise Companion to the Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Blackwell), and Genre and Culture in the Eighteenth Century; or, Serious Reflections on Occasional Forms: Essays in Honor of J. Paul Hunter.