In literary criticism, a Bildungsroman (German pronunciation: [ˈbɪldʊŋs.ʁoˌmaːn], plural Bildungsromane, German pronunciation: [ˈbɪldʊŋs.ʁoˌmaːnə]) is a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood (coming of age), in which character change is important.[4][lower-alpha 1] The term comes from the German words Bildung ("education", alternatively "forming") and Roman ("novel").
The term was coined in 1819 by philologist Johann Karl Simon Morgenstern in his university lectures, and was later famously reprised by Wilhelm Dilthey, who legitimized it in 1870 and popularized it in 1905. The genre is further characterized by a number of formal, topical, and thematic features.[7] The term coming-of-age novel is sometimes used interchangeably with bildungsroman, but its use is usually wider and less technical.
The birth of the bildungsroman is normally dated to the publication of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1795–96, or, sometimes, to Christoph Martin Wieland's Geschichte des Agathon of 1767.[9] Although the bildungsroman arose in Germany, it has had extensive influence first in Europe and later throughout the world. Thomas Carlyle's English translation of Goethe's novel (1824) and his own Sartor Resartus (1833–34), the first English bildungsroman, inspired many British novelists.[10][11][12] In the 20th century, it spread to France[13][14] and several other countries around the globe.[15]
Barbara Whitman noted that the Iliad might be the first Bildungsroman. It is not just "the story of the Trojan War. The Trojan War is in effect the backdrop for the story of Achilles' development. At the beginning Achilles is still a rash youth, making rash decisions which cost dearly to himself and all around him. (...) The story reaches its conclusion when Achilles has reached maturity and allows King Priam to recover Hector's body".[16]
The genre translates fairly directly into the cinematic form, the coming-of-age film.
A bildungsroman is a growing up or "coming of age" of a generally naive person who goes in search of answers to life's questions with the expectation that these will result in gaining experience of the world. The genre evolved from folklore tales of a dunce or youngest child going out in the world to seek their fortune.[17] Usually in the beginning of the story, there is an emotional loss which makes the protagonist leave on their journey. In a bildungsroman, the goal is maturity, and the protagonist achieves it gradually and with difficulty. The genre often features a main conflict between the main character and society. Typically, the values of society are gradually accepted by the protagonist and they are ultimately accepted into society—the protagonist's mistakes and disappointments are over. In some works, the protagonist is able to reach out and help others after having achieved maturity.
Franco Moretti "argues that the main conflict in the Bildungsroman is the myth of modernity with its overvaluation of youth and progress as it clashes with the static teleological vision of happiness and reconciliation found in the endings of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister and even Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice".[18]
There are many variations and subgenres of bildungsroman that focus on the growth of an individual. An Entwicklungsroman ("development novel") is a story of general growth rather than self-cultivation. An Erziehungsroman ("education novel") focuses on training and formal schooling,[19] while a Künstlerroman ("artist novel") is about the development of an artist and shows a growth of the self.[20] Furthermore, some memoirs and published journals can be regarded as bildungsroman although claiming to be predominantly factual (e.g. The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac or The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto "Che" Guevara).[21] The term is also more loosely used to describe coming-of-age films and related works in other genres.
19th century
- The Betrothed, by Alessandro Manzoni (1827)[29]
- The Red and the Black, by Stendhal (1830)
- Sartor Resartus, by Thomas Carlyle (1833–34)[12]
- Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë (1847)[31]
- Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë (1847)[33]
- Netochka Nezvanova, by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1849)[34]
- David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens (1850)
- Green Henry, by Gottfried Keller (1855)[35]
- The Morgesons, by Elizabeth Stoddard (1862)
- Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens (1861)[36]
- Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott (1869)[37]
- Sentimental Education, by Gustave Flaubert (1869)
- The Adolescent, by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1875)[38]
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (1884)
- What Maisie Knew, by Henry James (1897)[39]
20th century
- Kim, by Rudyard Kipling (1901)[40]
- Beneath the Wheel, by Hermann Hesse, 1906
- Martin Eden, by Jack London (1909)[41]
- The Book of Khalid, by Ameen Rihani (1911)[42]
- Sons and Lovers, by D. H. Lawrence (1913)[43]
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce (1916)[20]
- Demian, by Hermann Hesse (1919)[44]
- This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1920)[45]
- The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann (1924)
- Pather Panchali, by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay (1929)[46]
- Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)[47]
- The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger (1951)[48]
- Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, (1952)
- Children of Violence, by Doris Lessing (1952–1969)[49]
- In the Castle of My Skin, by George Lamming (1953)[50]
- A Separate Peace, by John Knowles (1956)
- Goodbye, Columbus, by Philip Roth (1959)[51]
- To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee (1960)[48]
- Wake in Fright, by Kenneth Cook (1961)[52]
- The Emperor of Ice-Cream, by Brian Moore (1965)[53]
- Dune, by Frank Herbert (1965)[54]
- The Outsiders, by S. E. Hinton (1967)[55]
- A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin (1968)[56]
- Bright Lights, Big City, by Jay McInerney (1984)[57]
- How to Kill a Bull, by Anna-Leena Härkönen (1984)[58]
- Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card (1985)[55]
- Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson (1985)[59]
- Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami (1987)[60]
- English Music, by Peter Ackroyd (1992)[61]
- Harry Potter, by J. K. Rowling (1997)[62]
- The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky (1999)[63]
- Naruto, by Masashi Kishimoto (1999)[64]
- Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi (2000)[65]
21st century
- The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd (2002)[66]
- The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini (2003)[67]
- The Fortress of Solitude, by Jonathan Lethem (2003)[68]
- Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)[48]
- Indecision, by Benjamin Kunkel (2005)[69]
- Black Swan Green, by David Mitchell (2006)[70]
- Goodnight Punpun, by Inio Asano (2007-2013)[71]
- Indignation, by Philip Roth (2008)[lower-alpha 2]
- Sputnik Caledonia, by Andrew Crumey (2008)[72]
- Neapolitan Novels, by Elena Ferrante (2011–2014)[73]
- Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan (2018)[74]
- Boy Swallows Universe, by Trent Dalton (2018)[75]
Engel explains that the term has in recent years been applied to very different novels but originally meant a novel of formation of a character, of an individual personality on interaction (including conflict) with society. He also points out that it was, like the "novel of education" (Erziehungsroman), a subgenre of the "novel of development" (Entwicklungsroman).
Back of the French translation in the "Folio" collection (éditions Gallimard, 2010): "[...] Avec ce roman d'apprentissage, Philip Roth poursuit son analyse de l'histoire de l'Amérique – celle des années cinquante, des tabous et des frustrations sexuelles – et de son impact sur la vie d'un homme jeune, isolé, vulnérable".
Iversen, Annikin Teines (2010). Change and Continuity; The bildungsroman in English (PhD). University of Tromsø. hdl:10037/2486 – via Munin open research archive.
Swales, Martin. The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. 38.
Buckley, J. H. (1974). Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding, Harvard Univ Press, ISBN 978-0-67479-640-9.
Slaughter, J. R. (2006). "Novel Subjects and Enabling Fictions: the Formal Articulation of International Human Rights Law", Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law, Ch. 2 (2007), New York: Fordham University Press, ISBN 978-0-82322-817-1; doi:10.5422/fordham/9780823228171.001.0001.
Whitman, Barbara C. "The Iliad as a Bildungsroman". In Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Roundtable on Classical Greece (eds. Victor Kromberg and Amalia Stanton, pp. 71, 73.
"Franco Moretti et John Neubauer, historiens de la littérature, ont tous deux insisté sur le rôle fondamental qu'a joué le roman, depuis la fin du XVIIIe siècle jusqu'à la Première Guerre mondiale, dans la construction des âges de la vie, de l'adolescence et la jeunesse. Si, avant cette période, les jeunes sont les laissés-pour-compte de la littérature romanesque, cette entrée tardive est compensée par la place centrale qu'ils occupent dans le roman de formation. Vers la fin du XIXe siècle, quand ce genre entre en crise, les jeunes sont remplacés par les adolescents, nouveaux protagonistes des œuvres de fiction. Après les écrits de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, le roman de formation, ou Bildungsroman, dont l'apogée se situe entre Les années d'apprentissage de Wilhelm Meister de Goethe (1795–1796) et l'Éducation sentimentale de Flaubert (1869), invente la figure littéraire du jeune homme voyageur. C'est à partir donc de cette période qu'il faudra retrouver certains traits des voyages fictionnels, que j'appelle matrices , qui hantent encore notre imaginaire, et que l'on retrouve dans les séjours Erasmus contemporains" (Cicchelli Vincenzo, "Les legs du voyage de formation à la Bildung cosmopolite" Archived 4 June 2018 at the Wayback Machine, Le Télémaque, 2010/2 (n° 38), pp. 57–70. DOI: 10.3917/tele.038.0057.
Lazzaro-Weis, Carol. "The Female 'Bildungsroman': Calling It into Question", NWSA Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Winter, 1990), pp. 16–34. JSTOR 4315991
Malone, David H. Faculty Development, or Faculty Life as a "Bildungsroman", Profession (1979), pp. 46–50. JSTOR 25595312
"El lazarillo de Tormes" (PDF) (in Spanish). Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte (Spain). 2004. p. 1. Archived from the original (PDF) on 9 October 2022. Retrieved 24 November 2013.
McWilliams, Ellen (2009). Margaret Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman. Ashgate Publishing. p. 14. ISBN 978-0-7546-6027-9. The two early English Bildungsromane already mentioned, Tom Jones and The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, are examples of coming-of-age narratives that predate the generic expectations of the German tradition.
Feder, Helena (2014). Ecocriticism and the Idea of Culture: Biology and the Bildungsroman. Routledge. p. 30. ISBN 9781315578644. Candide exhibits several of the traits of the "traditional" or Germanic Bildungsroman, particularly the depiction of the development of an individual through travel. As a catalogue of the horrors of the modern world, Candide — perhaps more than any of the other texts examined in this book—lives up to Moretti's articulation of the Bildungsroman as the "'symbolic form' of modernity" (5). Read from an ecocultural perspective, this philosophical Bildungsroman suggests the limitations of Dialectic 's conceptions of the Enlightenment and the subject with a model, albeit a modest one, for interaction with the world outside of rationalism's logic of domination.
Martin Coyle; et al., eds. (1990). "Formalism and the Novel: Henry James". Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism. New York: Routledge Florence. p. 593.
Nash, Geoffrey (1994). "Ameen Rihani's The Book of Khalid and the Voice of Thomas Carlyle". New Comparison Journal (17). Colchester, UK: The British Comparative Literature Association, University of Essex.
Hendriksen, Jack (1993). This side of paradise as a Bildungsroman. P. Lang. ISBN 0-8204-1852-8.
Tredell, Nicolas (1 July 2017). "Minglings: Form, Style, and Theme in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God" (PDF). Critical Approaches to Literature: 92–106 – via The Wikipedia Library. In her introduction to the 1986 Virago edition, Holly Eley calls it "primarily a love story" and also "an account of a strong, intelligent (though uneducated) woman's steps towards self-fulfilment" (Hurston vii). In generic terms, this latter definition would make Hurston's novel a Bildungsroman, a story of (self-)education by life.
Jay McInerney. "The Good Life". transcript of podcast. Archived from the original on 8 February 2013. Retrieved 3 January 2013.
- Abel, Elizabeth; Hirsch, Marianne; Langland, Elizabeth (1983), The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.
- Bakhtin, Mikhail (1996), "The Bildungsroman and its Significance in the History of Realism", in Emerson, Caryl; Holquist, Michael (eds.), Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, pp. 10–59, ISBN 978-0-292-79256-2, OCLC 956882417.
- Bolaki, Stella (2011), Unsettling the Bildungsroman: Reading Contemporary Ethnic American Women's Fiction, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.
- Engel, Manfred (2008), "Variants of the Romantic 'Bildungsroman' (with a Short Note on the 'Artist Novel')", in Gerald Gillespie; Manfred Engel; Bernard Dieterle (eds.), Romantic Prose Fiction, A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages, vol. XXIII, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 263–295, ISBN 978-90-272-3456-8.
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- Japtok, Martin Michael (2005), Growing up Ethnic: Nationalism and the Bildungsroman in African-American and Jewish-American Fiction, University of Iowa Press.
- Jeffers, Thomas L. (2005), Apprenticeships: The Bildungsroman from Goethe to Santayana, New York: Palgrave, ISBN 1-4039-6607-9.
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