ABSTRACT
On 31 August 1688 John Bunyan died after contracting a fever on a journey from Reading to London. The publication of a range of collections of essays signalled Bunyan's important status as an object of academic knowledge within a range of disciplines. The celebrations in 1928 of the tercentenary of the birth of John Bunyan were on a grander scale and more varied than those of 1988. The case for Bunyan and his texts to be included within the canon of great English literature on artistic rather than historical grounds had been made by expert, if in some cases reluctantly professional, witnesses. The description of Bunyan as a prisoner was repeated in Prison Meditations, a short poem which was first published as an appendix to Christian Behaviour. The process of seeking self-knowledge advocated in Bunyan's texts connects with a range of practices through which the individual subject is located in relation to the scheme of predetermined fates.
