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6 - Teaching with The Pilgrim’s Progress Video Game

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 April 2020

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Summary

Every age has its storytelling form, and video gaming is a huge part of our culture. You can ignore or embrace video games and imbue them with the best artistic quality. People are enthralled with video games in the same way as other people love the cinema or theatre.

—Andy Serkis

I believe it's one the unique properties of the video game experience that is very difficult to develop in the traditional filmmaking process. While films are a very visual and emotional artistic medium, video games take it one step further into the realm of a unique personal expe- rience.

—Jet Li

As far as the adaptation of literary texts is concerned, the afterlife of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) is a fascinating example. The reli- gious allegory about Christian's journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City has been adapted to a variety of mediums and formats through- out the nineteenth, twentieth, and now the twenty-first centuries. Each of the resulting adaptations does something a little different with its source material, reformulating Bunyan's narrative for its own particular medium. Nathaniel Hawthorne's “Celestial Railroad” (1843), for instance, revises the narrative into a mostly physical journey and pushes against Bunyan's exclu- sive notion of Christianity. And David MacAdam's Celestial City (1994), a musical adaptation, focuses on the influence of Bunyan's imprisonment on The Pilgrim's Progress. In addition to these explicit reformulations of The Pilgrim's Progress, there are also many more indirect references to Bunyan and his text in modern culture. For instance, the title of William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847) refers to a particular episode in The Pilgrim's Progress; John Steinbeck lists the text as one of his anonymous protagonist's favorite books in The Grapes of Wrath (1939); and Alan Moore includes Christian as one of the first members of the eponymous league in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999). These examples speak to the ongoing relevance of Bunyan's allegory in modern British and American culture and to writers’ abilities to cater elements of that allegory to their own stories. And as Isabel Hofmeyr has pointed out in The Portable Bunyan, the allegory also continues to have a powerful impact on African life and culture.

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Adapting the Eighteenth Century
A Handbook of Pedagogies and Practices
, pp. 95 - 108
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2020

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