John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress: From Emblem to Comics

Abstract

The article analyses the imagery of John Bunyan’s allegorical treatise The Pilgrim’s Progress, which belongs to the most important works of both English and world culture, and its visual embodiment tradition. The illustration series for Bunyan’s book were created almost immediately after its first publication in 1678. The study shows that even the early illustrations for The Pilgrim’s Progress can be characterized as creolized texts, since they form a single complex with accompanying texts. Stable images associated with one or another episode of the book, are formed already at the end of the 17th century. They are used in illustrated books and comics in the 20th–21st centuries. Each of the images is the result of the development or revision of a long pictorial tradition. Although each image is based on the corresponding fragment of the book, its specific realizations reflect both the artist’s ideas and a certain artistic style of the time. As the language of culture underwent a global change at the turn of the 18th–19th centuries, the illustrations for The Pilgrim’s Progress gradually became more realistic, allegorism in them receded into the background. The artists of the 20th–21st centuries turned to new forms of material presentation, that is to illustrated books and comics. The illustrations accompanying the text of Bunyan’s book become allegorical again but on a different level, consistent with the perception of the modern readership.