earticle

영어

John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is well known for its unique employment of allegory. Use of this well-known feature, however, has been discussed mainly in aesthetic and formal terms without consideration of the historical and cultural contexts in which the language of allegory became the site of political struggles. To remedy the void, this paper attempts to look at the literary work from the perspective of the Restoration, a historically turbulent period in which Bunyan and the Dissenting community he belonged to collided head to head with King Charles II and his court followers over not only religious but also linguistic and literary matters. To better appreciate how a literary form was more than a mere personal choice in Bunyan’s times, relevant examples such as the popularity of heroic couplets in King Charles’ courtly circles and the Puritans’ ambiguous and even contradictory attitude towards allegory are provided and discussed at length. In the course of discussion, one of the most recent, well-known scholarly works on Bunyan’s allegory (i.e. Thomas Luxon’s Literal Figures) is introduced to reveal some shortcomings with his ontological interpretation and to suggest an alternative understanding of Bunyan’s allegory. What becomes clear in this discussion is that Bunyan was fully aware of possible dangers an easy rendition of Christian doctrine in the form of allegory might entail but he ventured to use the method in order to reach more broadly and teach more effectively Godly wisdom and divine knowledge to his primary target audience—the Dissenting readers.