Two updates in one day! I make this one largely because it amuses me. I went into university today to use the library and I decided to browse the shelves. I intended to take out another "flavour of the times" book, to read just as I'm reading Locke now, and I ended up holding a copy of The Pilgrim's Progress. I'm also reading a book on the religious dissenters of the seventeenth century and Bunyan's name has come up, hence my interest.
I think what convinced me to borrow it was the first sentence of the introduction to the OWC 1984 edition:
The Pilgrim's Progress holds a unique place in the history of our literature. No other seventeenth-century text save the King James Bible...has enjoyed such an extensive readership. (IX)
What a claim! Of course, some seventeenth-century works, such as those by Aphra Behn, have only risen to mass-popularity in recent years, and other highly influential works, such as Hobbes' Leviathan and Newton's Principia, aren't really widely-read. It's also true that The Pilgrim's Progress has fallen very much out of fashion in these times whereas a cursory glance at its Wikipedia page suggests that it was staple reading during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Still, has Bunyan's work enjoyed a more extensive readership than Paradise Lost? The Book of Common Prayer? Or - dare I say it? - Othello, The Tempest, Hamlet, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, and King Lear?
What a book it must be. Could this serve as a warning to academics everywhere to restrain their enthusiasm for their subject?
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