Reading Piers Plowman and The pilgrim's progress
Subtitle: reception and the Protestant reader
By: Barbara A. Johnson.
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
Published: 1992
Place of publication: Carbondale
Language: eng
Number of pages: 318
Subjects: Langland, William, 1330?-1400?; Bunyan, John, 1628-1688.; Christian literature, English -- History and criticism.; Christian pilgrims and pilgrimages in literature.; Protestants -- Books and reading -- England.; Puritan movements in literature.; Protestantism and literature.; Reader-response criticism.
Description: Centering her discussion on two historical "ways of reading"--Which she calls the Protestant and the lettered - Barbara A. Johnson traces the development of a Protestant readership as it is reflected in the reception of Langland's Piers Plowman and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Informed by reader-response and reception theory and literacy and cultural studies, Johnson's ambitious examination of these two ostensibly literary texts charts the cultural roles they played in the centuries following their composition, roles far more important than their modern critical reputations can explain. The reception of these two works, revealing as it does changing ideas concerning the nature and status of books as well as the stature of authors, documents the means by which a culture shapes and is shaped by texts. Johnson argues that much more evidence exists about how earlier readers read than has hitherto been acknowledged. The reception of Piers Plowman, for example, can be inferred from references to the work, the apparatus its Renaissance printer inserted in his editions, the marginal comments readers inscribed both in printed editions and in manuscripts, and the apocryphal "plowman" texts that constitute interpretations of Langland's poem. Conditioned more by religious, historical, and economic forces than literary concerns, Langland's poem became a part of the reformist tradition that culminated in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. By understanding this tradition, Bunyan's place in it, and the way the reception of The Pilgrim's Progress illustrates the beginning of a new more realistic fictional tradition, Johnson concludes, we can begin to delineate a more accurate history of the ways literature and society intersect, a history of readers reading.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 293-308) and index.