Parallel narratives and the question of novelness in John Bunyan's the pilgrim’s progress : a reading of its genre

Abstract EN

The present study attempts to probe into a genre reading of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim Progress as this is deemed as one of the founding texts in English letters.

It thus tries to have Bunyan's work re-contextualised within the historical and formal debate of the rise of the novel and the very idea of Novelness.

Within the framework and practice of novelness, it is proposed here that formal (generic) self-consciousness is pre-structured within the allegorical renditions of the human condition; these renditions are more likely to be seen as gearing toward being part of the pre- or parallel-history of the novel vis-à-vis the debatable norms of formal realism.

Keywords: parallel narratives, inclusionism, novelness, meta-allegory.

John Bunyan‟s The Pilgrim’s Progress is to be approached here by borrowing the aesthetic of “inclusionism”1 and, as it were, its ensuing practice of the “genus universum”2 from the field of the medieval literature and criticism.

Inclusionism roughly means the meshing together of diverse literary genres, styles, and conventions within the contour of one literary piece of writing.

This approach is made necessary by the fact that The Pilgrim’s Progress is not canonised by the now well-established norms of formal realism to be the literary ancestor of the English novel.

This is Ian Watt's pivotal argument about the novelness of