Bunyan’s Way of Reading

Abstract

FOR JOHN BUNYAN the Pilgrim/Christian Way is a Protestant, Nonconformist, Calvinist Way, and so a matter of reading. The Way of Salvation, getting to the New Jerusalem, is a matter of Scripture – the Big Biblical Book – and how you get at the Book’s meanings. And in offering its sensationally popular set of similitudes, or allegories, of the Christian journey, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) comprises an allegory, a case – indeed a showcase – of allegories, of reading as such. Here are allegories of biblicist Nonconformist hermeneutic in practice, in action, which surely acquire the force of allegories of reading per se, as Stanley Fish and Wolfgang Iser have powerfully suggested, and of modernist, even postmodernist, reading at that.1 This book about the Christian readerly Way, which has the Big Book about the Way, and what to do with that Biblical Book – how it might, indeed how it must, be read – as its main matters, proves, arrestingly, a kind of Hitchhiker’s Guide to what you could see as the striking pre-postmodernity of Puritan, Nonconformist reading.2