Four years after John Bunyan released his instantly popular journey allegory The Pilgrim's Progress, he published The Holy War--a battle allegory and companion volume. His first book explores salvation of the individual Christian; the second portrays the battle for sanctification. While Christian struggles with questions about assurance of salvation, the collective Mansoul labors with the challenges of being led by and filled with the Holy Spirit. The Pilgrim's Progress focuses on the individual's struggle against sin; The Holy War portrays the Church in a corporate struggle against systemic evil. Bunyan wrote that The Holy War originates in "the same heart, and head, fingers and pen" as The Pilgrim's Progress. Both books present separate dimensions of Bunyan's spiritual journey. Taken together, the journey allegory and the battle allegory capture the full range and depth of the biblical message that consumed Bunyan's imagination. He credits his own salvation to these two things: The grace of God and tenacious, continual, holy warfare. The Holy War is testimony to a spiritual battle he fought, and won. This edition provides annotations that clarify Bunyan's first edition language and message for readers in a post-Puritan world.

"All who have undertaken to take an estimate of Bunyan's literary genius call special attention to the richness of his imaginative power. Few writers indeed have possessed this power in so high a degree. In nothing, perhaps, is its vividness more displayed than in the reality of its impersonations. The dramatis persons are not shadowy abstractions, moving far above us in a mystical world, or lay figures ticketed with certain names, but solid men and women of our own flesh and blood, living in our own everyday world, and of like passions with ourselves. Many of them we know familiarly; there is hardly one we should be surprised to meet any day. This lifelike power of characterization belongs in the highest degree to 'The Pilgrim's Progress.' It is hardly inferior in "The Holy War," though with some exceptions the people of 'Mansoul' have failed to engrave themselves on the popular memory as the characters of the earlier allegory have done. The secret of this graphic power, which gives 'The Pilgrim's Progress' its universal popularity, is that Bunyan describes men and women of his own day, such as he had known and seen them. They are not fancy pictures, but literal portraits."--Edmund Venables, M.A. (Author) - Amazon.com

Essays on British novelists who were pioneers in establishing the thematic concerns, and creating the form of the classic British novel. Works reflect themes and attitudes of the modern era - unjust social and political constraints; maudlin sentimentality; fascination with thing exotic and horrifying; deepening skepticism about the validity of social, political, and religious institutions on which the old order depends.