Bildungsroman

A bildungsroman (IPA: [ˈbɪldʊŋs.roˌmaːn]; German: "novel of formation") is a novelistic genre that arose during the German Enlightenment , in which the author presents the psychological, moral and social shaping of the personality of a (usually young) protagonist.

The term was coined by Johann Carl Simon Morgenstern.^[1]

Features

The Bildungsroman generally takes the following course:

• The protagonist grows from child to adult.
• The protagonist must have a reason to embark upon his or her journey. A loss or discontent must, at an early stage, jar him away from his home or family setting.
• The process of maturation is long, arduous and gradual, involving repeated clashes between the hero's needs and desires and the views and judgments enforced by an unbending social order. This bears some similarity to Sigmund Freud's concept of the pleasure principle versus the reality principle.
• Eventually, the spirit and values of the social order become manifest in the protagonist, who is ultimately accommodated into the society. The novel ends with the protagonist's assessment of himself and his new place in that society.

Within the broader genre, an entwicklungsroman is a story of general growth rather than self-culture, an erziehungsroman focuses on training and formal education, and a künstlerroman is about the development of an artist and shows a growth of the self.

Many other genres, separate from the bildungsroman genre, can include elements of the bildungsroman as a prominent part of their story lines, while not in themselves fitting the criteria of the bildungsroman. A military story will frequently show a raw recruit receiving a baptism of fire and becoming a battle-hardened soldier, while a high-fantasy quest may show a transformation from an adolescent protagonist into an adult aware of his powers or lineage. Neither of those genres or stories, however, corresponds exactly to the bildungsroman.

Select examples

This is by no means an attempt to produce a complete list of works within the genre, but instead, a partial list, intended to demonstrate select works that are widely acknowledged to be representative of the genre.

• Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the paragon of the genre (1795–96)
• The Red and the Black, by Stendhal (1830)
• Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
• David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens (1850)
• Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens (1860–61)
• Sentimental Education, by Gustave Flaubert (1869)
• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce (1914–15)
• Demian, by Hermann Hesse (1919)
• I'm Such a Gangster, by Thomas Mann (1924)
• All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque (1928)
• The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham (1955)
• The Catcher In The Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951)^[2]
• Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling (1997–2007)

See also

• Coming of age

References

• Abrams, M. H. (2005). Glossary of Literary Terms (Eighth Edition ed.). Boston: Thomson Wadsworth. ISBN 1413002188. 
• Jeffers, Thomas L. (2005). Apprenticeships: The Bildungsroman from Goethe to Santayana. New York: Palgrave. ISBN 1403966079. 
• Szweykowski, Zygmunt (1972). Twórczość Bolesława Prusa (2nd ed. ed.). Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. 
• Manfred Engel: 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, Bd. XXIII; ed. by the International Comparative Literature Association). Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins 2008, pp. 263-295. ISBN 978-9027234568.