Awakening Words : John Bunyan and the Language of Community

This study examines Bunyan's questions concerning the power and limitations of language to effect personal, social, and political transformation within and beyond his nonconformist community.

Its focus is the interaction of textual and political worlds in seventeenth-century England, as Bunyan considers and portrays the possibility of acting meaningfully by creating imaginative worlds in writing for members of an oppressed and persecuted community.