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© Oxford University Press PAUL DAVIS ADDISON AND HUME thought Bunyan's ear for the rhythms and idioms of conversation disfigured his work, but since Coleridge it has been regarded as one of his best features.1 According to Roger Sharrock, `his language has the life of speech, salted with proverbs and vigorous provincial turns of phrase; it is the plain colloquial manner that he no doubt also employed in the pulpit', while for N. H. Keeble `Bunyan captures the linguistic mannerisms of ordinary people . . . his model was not any convention of pastoral rusticity but the actual language as spoken on the roads and in the towns of East Anglia'.2 Current enthusiasm for his style's demotic authenticity may, however, block a fair hearing of Bunyan as thoroughly as the patrician disgust of some Augustan commentators. Bunyan himself would not have believed it `to his advantage' to have his works praised for their truth to `the life of speech', since he wrote them in the service of a Life-giving truth which is, ultimately, beyond human speaking. He had eternal grounds to suspect as much as cherish his talent for the colloquial; to detach an appreciation of that talent
Essays in Criticism – Oxford University Press
Published: Jul 1, 2000
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