Bunyan's Pilgrim Research Articles

Progress's Pilgrim: a critical narrative of research in progress.

There is increasing interest in the use of stories to develop nursing and health care practice. This paper reports on how we used story to understand and develop research on nursing practice. Story (or narrative) and science can be seen as distinct but complementary paradigms. We have found that a story framework can help researchers to reflect on a process of social scientific investigation, and to consider how to 'go on' in that process. In a study on 'Community psychiatric nurses' empowerment of people with enduring mental disorders in the community: involving users to develop services' we have encountered a number of interesting and challenging issues related to design and use of methods. We present these issues within a framework of story analysis, focusing on issues related to empowerment. This analysis draws on Burke's 'pentad' of story elements as a framework for narrative analysis. We present the elements of the 'story of the study-as-funded' and as it was carried out through the pilot stage, and outline the story of developments in the main study. 'Trouble' in a story centres on a problematic 'ratio' of story elements. The 'trouble' at this stage in the progress of our study relates to lack of fit between some parts of the instruments (the methods) and the goal (empowerment), and to the status of the CPNs as actors or agents. Narrative analysis sensitizes us to these issues of 'trouble' and provides a means of addressing them. Like John Bunyan's Pilgrim, we have learned through our progress; unlike Pilgrim, we know not our end.

Mr. Darwin's Shooter (review)

Mr. Darwin's Shooter by Roger McDonald Grove/Atlantic, 1999, 376 pp., $25 A recent Charles Darwin biographer called Syms Covington "the unacknowledged shadow behind [Darwin's] every triumph." In Mr. Darwin's Shooter, his seventh novel, Australian author Roger McDonald brings the shadow to life, creating from little-known history a richly human character. Born in 1816, the son of a butcher in the English village of Bedford, Covington longs for a grander destiny than that of his father His early life features a series of obsessive relationships with men whom he believes can set him on the path to greatness. As a child he idolizes the Christian in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress; later he fixates on a flesh-and-blood version of the character, a young missionary named John Phipps. At the age of twelve Covington follows Phipps to sea, intent on seeking his fortune as a sailor. Eventually he secures a berth on HMS Beagle, where he lobbies hard for the favor of the ship's gentleman . McDonald's depiction of this "courtship" brings shipboard pontics and class consciousness into close view and provides some of the book's most interesting period details. Soon Covington is taken on as Darwin's domestic servant and assistant in the field, shooting, collecting and organizing the specimens needed for research. At the age of twenty-two, after seven years at Darwin's side, Covington parts with his master in England to strike out for the wide-open Australian frontier . For all of the main character's likeability , the earlier part of the book fails to transcend the overly familiar structure of a seagoing coming-ofage story. McDonald's attention to verisimilitude is admirable but overdone : after Covington joins with Darwin, the narrative bogs down in scientific and period detail. (The gruntwork of great science doesn't necessarily make for great fiction, and despite all its scientific importance , the voyage of the Beagle was rather uneventful.) The true crux of the story takes place thirty years later, in sections interwoven with the tale of Darwin's expedition. Covington is now middle aged and nearly deaf, a man of some means. He is presented to us through the eyes of David MacCracken , a young American doctor living on the coast of New South Wales. With MacCracken, Covington is able to both re-create and improve upon his relationship with Darwin. The young doctor changes his life as much as the young naturalist did, but this time the friendship is more egalitarian. The dynamic between the two men is intriguing, passing through cycles of dependency and frequent bouts of testiness. These conflicts pale in comparison to the debate raging inside Covington 's skull, however, for his first copy of The Origin ofSpecies is due to arrive any day. Though it didn'tfully register at the time, when he was bagging finches and transcribing the notes that would be the basis for the text, Covington had assisted Darwin in writing a book that refuted creationism. Now he must reconcile the two most significant forces in his life, and McDonald describes this The Missouri Review · 193 struggle elegantly. Even more ingenious is how Darwin's principle of natural selection plays out in Covington 's relationship with his friends, his family and his future. (RB) Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov read by Jeremy Irons Random House (Audio), 1997, 8 cassettes, 12 hours, unabridged, $39.95 While the subject of Lolita—the sexual exploitation of a child— would seem to limit the tone of the story to unpleasant gritty realism, Nabokov breaks out of those limits by making the book to some extent a palpably "false" and inflated gothic confection à la Edgar Allan Poe. Humbert Humbert, the seducer, makes himself out to be a romantic exile, lost in the arabesques of his attraction to little girls. His machinations against Lolita's mother are the stuff of comedy—at least until Mrs. Haze discovers his diary, runs out of the house in horror, and is struck down by a car. The first seduction scene is written with hallucinogenic intensity, and it, along with many others, is partly comic in tone as Humbert's manic efforts to control...

PLASHING PEARS IN AUGUSTINE AND BUNYAN

The Careful Reader of St Augustine's Confessions and of part two of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress cannot help being struck by the similarities between two significant incidents of fruit stealing. In the Confessions a young Augustine steals pears from a neighbour's tree; in The Pilgrim's Progress Christiana's boys plash (steal) and eat the fruit of the trees of Beelzebub's garden. Both incidents take on large consequences and implications as the narratives unfold.

Kirke og prigrim i "Pilgrim's Progress"

John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress has usually been interpreted as a allegorical account of an individual pilgrim's search for salvation and sanctification on his lonely soul-journey, with a superimposed addition of church fellowship in the second part of the story. An interpretation like this loses the depth and complexity of Bunyan's story. Far from being an individual story Pilgrim's Progress describes the relationship and covenant between the individual pilgrim and the visible church of the elect as depicted in the Palace Beautiful. In Palace Beautiful, the history of the individual pilgrim from The City of Destruction to The Celestial City meets the history of God's salvation of his elected people from before creation to the Last Day. If any of these three layers of interpretation is missed out or translated into modern individualism, the whole scope of Bunyan's imaginative universe is reduced and oversimplified.

Margery Kempe: Hysteria and Mysticism Reconciled

^Margery Kempe: Hysteria and Mysticism Reconciled William B. Ober But I, except in bed, Wore hair-cloth next the skin, And nursed more than my child That gTudge against my side. Now, spirit and flesh assoil'd, Against the wild world I lace my pride in, Crying out odd and even. —Howard Nemerov, "A Poem of Margery Kempe"' Margery Kempe (ca. 1373-ca. 1440) was a fifteenth-century Englishwoman whose Book is a narrative of her pilgrimages and spiritual experiences. With a poet's insight Howard Nemerov tells us clearly that her incurable wound was sustained in child-bearing and delivery, that the damage to her ego (pride, first of the deadly sins) was as much spiritual as physical, that it set her against the world, and that she cried out against it, appearing odd to her neighbors but keeping even with her pilgrimage through life. The epigraph for this essay is the final strophe of Nemerov's poem, but the refrain that recurs after each stanza is Alas! that ever I did sin, It is full merry in heaven. These words she uttered one night after hearing a melody "so sweet and delectable, that she thought she had been in Paradise."2 Her past sins debarred her from heaven, and she repented of them. Coupling this insight with what is known of Margery's biography, what we can leam from her writing, what medical inferences can be drawn, perhaps William B. Ober 25 we can approach a more detailed, if less poetic, definition of her particular problem and illuminate some of the medical aspects of mystical experience. Until 1934 all that was known of Margery Kempe was seven pages in a quarto pamphlet printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1501, titled A shorte treatyse of contemplacyon taught by our lorde lhesu cryste, or taken out of the boke of Margene kempe of Lynn. A single copy was preserved in the Cambridge University Library, and its contents were selected passages so chosen as not to offend the religious sensibilities of early Tudor readers. These extracts gave a flavorless impression of Margery's character and spiritual development. In 1934 Col. William Butler-Bowdon, the representative of an old recusant Roman Catholic family in Yorkshire, sent for examination by experts at the Victoria and Albert Museum a manuscript book that had been "in the possession of [his] family from time immemorial."3 Hope Emily Allen identified it as the lost Book of Margery Kempe. Marginal notes in the manuscript as well as analysis of the handwriting, paper, and watermarks indicated that it had been written at King's Lynn between 1440 and 1450 and had been in the possession of the Yorkshire Charterhouse of Mount Grace prior to the dissolution of the monasteries. Col. Butler-Bowdon published a modern English version of the text in 1936, and a full critical edition supplemented by extensive annotation by Miss Allen was published by the Early English Text Society in 1940. Appearing de novo from five centuries past but lacking an established niche in the English mystical tradition, Margery Kempe was not warmly received by the public; even the Anglican and Roman Catholic press was reserved. To be sure, the late 1930s was not the optimal time to introduce a new mystic. The economic depression that began in 1929 was slowly improving, but political events in Europe were ominous. Waiting for the gun-butt on the door often precludes mystical contemplation, though Sir Thomas More's Dialogue of Comfort and John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress are among notable exceptions. The general level of spiritual aspiration in the 1930s was no higher than the moral rearmament advocated by the Oxford Group. Prophets, let alone mystics, were not wanted. In her prefatory note Miss Allen quotes Father David Thurston, S.J., who wrote soon after the Book appeared: "That Margery was a victim of hysteria can hardly be open to doubt." In an earlier definition of hysteria Thurston had written that it was "chiefly ... an exaggeration of suggestibility," a concept derived from the relation between hysteria and hypnotic states by the nineteenth-century studies of 26 MARGERY KEMPE Charcot, Janet, and their predecessors.4 But Miss...

Weber, Goethe, and the Nietzschean Allusion: Capturing the Source of the "Iron Cage" Metaphor

Edward Tiryakian recently argued that Max Weber was so deeply affected by John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress that he personally identified with one of its characters, a man who was trapped in an iron cage of despair. Therein, Tiryakian claimed, lies the origins of the famous “iron cage” metaphor that appears in the final pages of Talcott Parsons' translation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Challenging his view, this article argues that Weber was little affected by his reading of Puritan material, since he subsumed its example of inner worldly asceticism into German ideational models provided by Nietzsche and Goethe. The “iron cage” metaphor is the result of a mistranslation by Parsons, and cannot be attributed to Weber. Moreover, by conceiving of the Puritans as Übermenschen, Weber was unable to see the extent to which a desire for revenge against those in power helped to shape the economic activities of at least one Puritan group, the Quakers.

God, modality and meaning in some recent songs of Bob Dylan

There is an apocryphal legend that when Louis Armstrong was asked whether he considered his music to be folk music he replied: ‘Wal, yeah, I guess so: leastways, I never heard of no horse making it.’ If and when we talk of Bob Dylan as a folk singer, we do so partly of course in this fundamental sense: his music is of, about and for people. But we also mean — as Satchmo's interviewer must have done — that Dylan calls on resources and techniques that pertain to oral cultures rather than ostensibly to our own. Unlike ‘real’ folk song, Dylan's words and music are written down; yet what is notated is no more than an approximation to the sounds heard, which are created empirically for each performance, from verbal inflection and from the body's gestures. Dylan is a ‘folk’ artist in that his sources are absorbed at a more or less pre-conscious level: from the monody and banjo-picking of ‘poor white’ Americans and the traditions of white British folk music behind them; from the black blues and the African heritage it stemmed from; and from some more sophisticated, or at least literate, sources such as white hymn, march and parlour ballad. To these musical roots there are literary parallels: Dylan's verses have been deeply influenced by rural folk ballads, by the poetry of the blues, by the Bible, by Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (scarcely less pervasive in the Bible belts than the Good Book itself), by Hymns Ancient and Modern, by children's rhymes and by runic verse of all kinds, including Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, which are close to the core of Dylan's experience and which, although literary, were sung by the poet himself to improvised, presumably folk-like, tunes. In his early days Dylan operated with his voice — untrained, ‘natural’, veering between speech and song — and his acoustic guitar.

The element of witchcraft in "The scarlet letter."

allegories,' he evidently had in mind that type of symbolistic narrative in which there is no pretense of realism at the surface level, the characters being created as personifications of abstract ideas and the story told merely for the sake of the non-literal level of meaning. Such, for example, is 'The Celestial Railroad,' with its obvious indebtedness to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Hawthorne was well aware that there is a more sophisticated kind of allegory in which the surface story is consistently realistic, in which the events and characters are presented for their own sake even though, from the author's point of view, the literal story may be less important than the non-literal level or levels of meaning. As Mark Van Doren pointed out:

Heracles and Bunyan's Pilgrim

Heracles and Bunyan's Pilgrim

Art and Morality

OFTEN PERPLEXED by the nature of some sweet vision that has been given to critics and aestheticians who uphold a necessary bond between art and morality, we have tried to outline the connections that do in fact obtain.1 To accomplish this purpose the paper is studded with examples-the facts of the case most of which are obvious in their context, and all of which may be supported by further argument. For tlhe sake of brevity arguments as to the placing of this and that example are usually deleted; the examples are very largely left to their own defense. MIorality and art are connected at many levels and in many ways. The most obvious connection is found in those works of art tlhat present a code of action or a way of life. This sort of connection is found in allegory. A religious allegory such as Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is a prime example. Camus' La Peste is less codified but still allegorical. Other works are full of purpose and persuasion though devoid of allegory. An example is Tolstoy's portrayal of Levin's life in Anna Karenina. All these wvorks present and commend to us an account of the good life for man. The opposite turn also has its play. Here we find morality set in negative terms; in effect each artist condemns. Camus provides another example, as we can directly oppose the positive doctrine of La Peste

Art and Morality

OFTEN PERPLEXED by the nature of some sweet vision that has been given to critics and aestheticians who uphold a necessary bond between art and morality, we have tried to outline the connections that do in fact obtain.1 To accomplish this purpose the paper is studded with examples-the facts of the case most of which are obvious in their context, and all of which may be supported by further argument. For tlhe sake of brevity arguments as to the placing of this and that example are usually deleted; the examples are very largely left to their own defense. MIorality and art are connected at many levels and in many ways. The most obvious connection is found in those works of art tlhat present a code of action or a way of life. This sort of connection is found in allegory. A religious allegory such as Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is a prime example. Camus' La Peste is less codified but still allegorical. Other works are full of purpose and persuasion though devoid of allegory. An example is Tolstoy's portrayal of Levin's life in Anna Karenina. All these wvorks present and commend to us an account of the good life for man. The opposite turn also has its play. Here we find morality set in negative terms; in effect each artist condemns. Camus provides another example, as we can directly oppose the positive doctrine of La Peste

A Booklover's Browsings

A delightful moment was when one ceased reading juvenile literature and tackled adult books, able to do the mechanical reading and understand its content. With me that came early. In my teens I was romping, or ramping through Scott, Dickens, Lytton, Jane Austen, Reade and other Victorians, with Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress before that, back in my boyhood.

An American Pilgrim's Progress

A CONVENTIONAL rhetoric of spirit antedating Columbus' voyages of discovery helped to invest the new Western world and the way West with a magnetic attraction over European imaginations. It functioned to give the otherwise sordid pursuit of material riches moral and spiritual sanction, without which most men seem disinclined to dare and do. This rhetoric revolved on the spiritual voyage or quest for personal salvation and reached its fullest literary expression in Dante's Divine Comedy and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. In the patterns of Scripture as well as in the language of medieval church symbolism, the spiritual quest had traditionally been known as a journey toward light.' According to this interpretation, if the bower of light was Paradise or the Celestial City, the original source of the bright beam was God, symbolized by the life-giving sun. The sun in medieval popular thought represented God's truth and righteousness, illuminating the dark corners of sin with His saving radiance in its solar cycle from East to West. Medieval fable with its strange wonders and miraculous beings had the kingdom of earthly desire located vaguely and variously in Abyssinia, in Cathay and Ophir, somewhere in the Far East, beyond the western seas. Medieval explorers sought out the warmest climes of the sun.2 But Christians, for the most part, looked

The Voice of Africa: A Bit of Bunyan

Translation is not commonly esteemed to rank among the highest of literary arts; but it is a very useful art. Here is an example of what Africans are doing to naturalize glories of English literature. It is taken from the rendering of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress into Ila (a language of Northern Rhodesia) which won the prize in the Institute's Competition, 1937–8: the immortal scene of the trial of Christian and Faithful in the town that was named Vanity. The Rev. J. W. Price, who spent nearly twenty-seven years among the Ba-ila, has put it back into English as literally as possible, to show the degree to which Moses Mubitana has caught the meaning and spirit of the original.

Book Review: Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress

Book Review: Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress

Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.

Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.

Bunyan's pilgrim's progess

Bunyan's pilgrim's progess