- 上一篇：德语论文德国双元制职业教育
- 下一篇：英语专业口语教学中的非语言因素研究
John Bunyan was an English Christian writer and preacher. Although he became a non-conformist and member of an Independent church, and he has been described as a Baptist and Congregationalist, he himself preferred to be described simply as a Christian. He is remembered in the Church of England with a Lesser Festival on August 30, and on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (US) on August 29. Some other Churches of the Anglican Communion, such as the Anglican Church of Australia, honor him on the day of his death (August 31) together with St Aidan of Lindisfarne. Bunyan began his writing when he was in the Bedfordshire country, which prohibited the support of religious services outside the prognostic of the established Church in England. He is best-known for The Pilgrim’s Progress, which is widely recognized as his masterpiece. Early Bunyan scholars like John Brown believed that The Pilgrim’s Progress was begun in Bunyan’s second shorter sentence for six months in 1675, but more and more recent scholars like Roger Sharrock insisted that it was begun during Bunyan’s elementary, more long-winded sentence from 1660–72 after he had written his spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666).
The English work involves 108,260 words and is pided into two parts, each reading as a continuous narrative with no chapter pisions. The first part was completed in 1677 and entered into the stationers’ register on 22 December 1677. It was titled and entered in the “Term Catalogue” on 18 February 1678, which is regarded as the date of first publication. After the first edition of its first part in 1678, an expanded edition, which was written after Bunyan was freed, appeared in 1679. The Second Part appeared in 1684. There were totally eleven editions of the first part in John Bunyan’s lifetime, published in successive years from 1678 to 1685 and in 1688, and there were another two editions of the second part, published in 1684 and 1686. The first part of The Pilgrim’s Progress was about a Christian, an everyman character, which focuses on his journey from his hometown. The second part of The Pilgrim’s Progress shows the pilgrimage of Christian’s wife, sons and the maiden, Mercy. They visit the same places that Christian visited with the addition of Gaius’ Inn between the Valley of the Shadow of Death and Vanity Fair; but they take a longer time in order to accommodate marriage and childbirth for the four sons and their wives. Bunyan, in the Second Part, conveys the idea that women as well as men can be brave pilgrims.
Journey to the West, one of the Four Great Classical Novels of ancient Chinese literature, was completed by Wu Cheng’en, a Chinese novelist and poet in the 16th century during the Ming Dynasty.
Journey to the West has a strong background in Chinese folk religion, Chinese mythology and value systems; the pantheon of Taoist immortals and Buddhist bodhisattvas is still reflective of Chinese religious beliefs today. Enduringly popular, the tale is at once an adventure story, a spring of spiritual insight, and an extended allegory in which the group of pilgrims journeying toward India represents inpiduals journeying towards enlightenment.
In foreign countries, the work is popularly and widely well-known as Monkey, the title translated by Arthur Waley. The Waley translation has also been published as Adventures of the Monkey God, Monkey to the West, Monkey: Folk Novel of China, and The Adventures of Monkey, and in a further abridged version for children, Dear Monkey (1987).
The novel is a fictionalized work about the legendary pilgrimage to India of the Buddhist monk Xuanzang (Xuánzàng, 玄奘), and flabbily based its source on the historic text Great Tang Records on the Western Regions (646) and traditional folk tales. The monk traveled to the “Western Regions” during the Tang Dynasty, to obtain sacred texts (sūtras). The bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara (Guanyin), who instructs the Buddha to India, and gives three protectors (Sun Wukong, Zhu Bajie and Sha Wujing) task to help Xuanzang—together with a dragon prince who acts as Xuanzang’s steed, a white horse. These four characters have agreed to help Xuanzang as compensation for past sins.