‘Come ye out from among them, and be ye separate’

After 1660 John Bunyan’s publications articulated and enacted a conscientious dissent from, and opposition to, the religious and, to a degree, the political, authorities of the restored monarchical regime and the re-established episcopal Church of England. In so doing, they developed a circumstantially realistic, psychologically acute, autobiographically grounded body of work that frustrated the attempts of the regime to silence Dissent through imprisonment and censorship and, by addressing the everyday concerns of readers, not only contributed significantly to the establishment of Nonconformity but created a body of work that dissented from the literary and cultural conventions of elitist Restoration writing and pointed to the way to the predominance of works of direct address to a mass readership that would characterize the English literary future.