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  • عنوان المشاركة: Everything about  Bildungsroman Movement
مرسل: السبت أيلول 24, 2011 1:14 م 
مشرف موسوعة الأدب الانجليزي
مشرف موسوعة الأدب الانجليزي
صورة العضو الشخصية
اشترك في: 17 كانون الأول 2007
المواضيع: 60
المشاركات: 1898
المكان: Britain
القسم: Literature, Film, and Theatre
السنة: MA
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غير متصل
 
Bildungsroman
MOVEMENT ORIGIN
c. 1766


Bildungsroman is the name affixed to those novels that concentrate on the development or education of a central character. German in origin, ‘‘bildungs’’ means formation, and ‘‘roman’’ means novel. Although The History of Agathon, written by Christoph Martin Wieland in 1766–1767, may be the first known example, it was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, written in 1795, that took the form from philosophical to personal development and gave celebrity to the genre.

More than any other type of novel, the Bildungsroman intends to lead the reader to greater personal enrichment as the protagonist journeys from youth to psychological or emotional maturity. Traditionally, this growth occurs according to a pattern: the sensitive, intelligent protagonist leaves home, undergoes stages of conflict and growth, is tested by crises and love affairs, then finally finds the best place to use his/her unique talents. Sometimes the protagonist returns home to show how well things turned out. Some Bildungsromans end with the death of the hero, leaving the promise of his life unfulfilled. Traditionally, English novelists complicate the protagonist’s battle to establish an individual identity with conflicts from outside the self. German novelists typically concentrate on the internal struggle of the hero. The protagonist’s adventures can be seen as a quest for the meaning of life or as a vehicle for the author’s social and moral opinions as demonstrated through the protagonist.

The Bildungsroman was especially popular until 1860. Its German affiliation, however, caused anti-German sentiment during the world wars to contribute to the demise of its influence, along with the emergence of a multitude of modern experiments in novel writing. Nonetheless, James Joyce wrote his Bildungsroman, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, in 1916, and the genre has continued to be adopted, with distinguishing variations, by writers of many nationalities

REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS

Charlotte Bronte (1816–1855)

Charlotte Bronte was born in Yorkshire, England, on April 21, 1816, the third of six children. Her two older sisters died in childhood, and Bronte¨ became very close to her remaining younger siblings, brother Branwell and sisters Emily and Anne. In 1846, Bronte¨ and her sisters published a collection of poetry under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, and although the collection was not well received by critics and readers, the three women continued to write. By 1849, Bronte¨ had lost her three beloved siblings—Branwell from complications of heavy drinking, and Emily and Anne to tuberculosis. Her writing career, however, was taking off with the success of Jane Eyre (1847), an excellent example of the female Bildungsroman. She married Arthur Bell Nichols, her father’s curate, in June 1854 and died less than a year later, on March 31, 1855, either from tuberculosis or from complications caused by pregnancy.

Charles Dickens (1812–1870)

One of the greatest British writers of all time, Charles Dickens was a Victorian novelist who chose the Bildungsroman form for at least two of his most famous works: David Copperfield (1849–1850) and Great Expectations (1860– 1861). Born in Portsmouth, England, on February 7, 1812, Dickens grew up in London. His father was a navy clerk who went to debtors’ prison when Dickens was twelve. Forced to go to work in a shoe dye factory, Dickens lived alone in fear and shame. These feelings led to the creation of his many orphan characters and his sympathy for the plight of the working class that made him the first great urban novelist. Although he was able to return to school and eventually clerked in a law firm, Dickens found his first success as a journalist and comic writer of the Pickwick Papers (1836–1837). However, his deep social concerns found expression in a rich intensity and variety in his later works. By the time of his death from a paralytic stroke at age 58 on June 9, 1870, Dickens had written many novels, including A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, and A Tale of Two Cities.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe  (1749–1832)

Born on August 28, 1749, in Frankfurt, Germany, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe became one of Europe’s most well-known and versatile writers. Noted for his lyrical poetry, his influential novels, and his dramatic poemFaust, Goethe also made substantial contributions in the fields of biology, music, and philosophy. He wrote the first comprehensive history of science. In 1795, he published Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, a novel that is considered a prime example of the Bildungsroman. In addition, Goethe profoundly affected the growth of literary Romanticism and introduced the novella. He died in Weimar on March 22, 1832, at the age of eighty-two.

James Joyce (1882–1941)

As a poet and novelist, James Joyce brought marked change to modern literature. Born in Dublin, Ireland, on February 2, 1882, Joyce moved frequently as a child because of his father’s drinking and financial difficulties. Joyce’s classic Kunstlerroman (novel of an artist’s development), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, portrays a hero who is a character blend of Joyce and his father. Despite the Joyce family situation, the novelist received a good education at a Jesuit school. But like his hero in A Portrait, Joyce later rejected religion, family, and his home country, living most of his life on the European continent. However, he wrote almost exclusively about Dublin. Joyce felt that being an artist required exile to protect oneself from sentimental involvements and that he could not write about Dublin with integrity and objectivity unless he went away. A Portrait established the modern concept of the artist as a bohemian who rejects middle-class values. It also set the example for a number of modern Irish Bildungsromans in which heroes achieve their quest when they come to believe that alienation from society, not finding one’s place in the social order, is the mark of maturity. Joyce died in Zurich on January 13, 1941, when he was only 59fifty-nine years old, but his innovations in literary organization and style, particularly his use of streamof- consciousness technique, secured his unique place in the development of the novel.

Thomas Mann (1875–1955)

Considered the leading German novelist of the twentieth century, Thomas Mann was born in northern Germany on June 6, 1875. However, after 1933, he lived in either Switzerland or the United States because of his opposition to the Nazis. By then he had already won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. His masterpiece, The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg), was written in 1924 and is a Bildungsroman, as is a later work, Doctor Faustus (1947). The overall theme of Mann’s works is the breakdown of civilization. Mann presents this theme in The Magic Mountain through a story about the patients in a Swiss sanatorium. Doctor Faustus is a Kunstlerroman in which the protagonist is an artist who makes a pactwith the devil to achieve creative vitality. The story ends tragically and parallels Germany’s pact with Hitler to restore national vitality that ends in destruction. Mann died of phlebitis near Zurich on August 12, 1955.

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963)

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 27, 1932. She lost her father shortly after her eighth birthday, an event and a relationship that proved a strong influence in her life and work. Plath showed early interest in writing, keeping a journal beginning at the age of 11. Plath was an ambitious poet but suffered from depression and suicidal tendencies. After graduating from Smith College in 1955, Plath attended Cambridge University on a Fulbright scholarship. At Cambridge, Plath met poet Ted Hughes and the two were married in 1956. Their relationship was tumultuous, as documented in their poetry and letters. They had two children together before separating in late 1962. A few months later, on February 11, 1963, Plath committed suicide. Although she had published only a handful of books during her lifetime, Hughes—who was still legally Plath’s husband— edited and posthumously published Plath’s large amount of previously unpublished poetry and letters. She is known as a poet of the Confessional generation. Her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar is a Bildungsroman, although it does not closely follow all of the usual Bildungsroman conventions.

Mark Twain (1835–1910)

Mark Twain is known as one of America’s leading realists, native humorists, and local colorists. He was a master in the use of folklore, psychological realism, and dialects. Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835, he died of heart disease in the city he had long made his home, Hartford, Connecticut, on April 21, 1910. Twain produced not one but several classics, including what some believe to be the greatest American novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), a picaresque and satirical Bildungsroman. Probably more than any other writer, Mark Twain provided a uniquely American, and usually comic, portrayal of the Bildungsroman hero. Sadly, Twain’s satire became bitter as his personal tragedies and financial reverses led to the disillusionment and depression that cloud his later writings.

Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813)

Whenever the Bildungsroman is discussed, Christoph Martin Wieland, who was born in Germany on September 5, 1733, is mentioned as the writer of The History of Agathon, the precursor novel to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. A translator whose work reflects the Enlightenment, the early eighteenth-century period also known as the Age of Reason, and whose style shows rococo influences, Wieland translated twenty-two plays by Shakespeare into German (1762–1766) and also translated the classical writings of Horace and Lucian. Many of Wieland’s own writings are set in Greece, including his Die Geschichte des Agathon (1766–1767, translated into English as The History of Agathon [1773]). In an early instance of publishing German literary periodicals, Wieland edited the journal Der deutsche Merkur (The German Mercury). Wieland died on January 21, 1813.

REPRESENTATIVE WORKS

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published in 1884 in England and Canada and in the United States a few months later, in 1885. Like the Bildungsroman hero, Huck leaves home to find an independent life, has a surrogate father in Jim, is in conflict with his society, and reaches maturity when he repents his treatment of Jim and puts fairness and friendship over expected behavior. Though considered by some to be a masterpiece of American literature, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn initially scandalized reviewers and parents who thought it would corrupt young children with its depiction of a hero who lies, steals, and uses coarse language. In the last half of the twentieth century, the condemnation of the book continued on the grounds that its portrayal of Jim and use of the word ‘‘nigger’’ are racist. While some justify the book as a documentation of the racial notions prevalent at the time of its writing, the novel continues to appear on some lists of books banned in schools across the United States.

The Bell Jar

Although Sylvia Plath is well known as a poet, her autobiographical Bildungsroman is one of the best-known works in modern American literature. Published in 1963, The Bell Jar tells the story of Esther Greenwood, a student editor on an internship at a women’s magazine in New York City. It follows the standard Bildungsroman pattern of the young person who goes to the big city to pursue professional aspirations. But there is no traditional happy ending. The psychological anguish of Plath’s later poetry is related to the confessional revelations of The Bell Jar, in which she describes the events that led to her nervous breakdown. One month after the English publication of this book in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, Plath committed suicide. The novel was published in England under Plath’s name in 1966 and in the United States in 1971.

Great Expectations

Great Expectations, published serially in 1860 and 1861 by Charles Dickens, follows the tradition of the Bildungsroman. The young protagonist, Pip, leaves his rural home to become a gentleman and win the girl of his dreams. While most Bildungsroman heroes have to make their own way, Pip has a mysterious benefactor who provides the wealth that Pip thinks will make him happy. However, in the course of finding his true values, Pip comes to realizes that happiness comes not from money but from the appreciation of good friends, regardless of their social status, and from personal integrity. This novel has become an all-time classic that is still required reading in many high school curricula.

Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was published in 1952 and won the 1953 National Book Award. Ellison’s first novel, it expresses in metaphorical language the Bildungsroman theme of searching for one’s identity. The nameless black protagonist, looking for his identity, comes to the realization that he has been living the roles prescribed for him by white society. But once he steps outside the assigned sphere, he becomes ‘‘invisible’’ to a dominant culture that does not recognize his individuality. Employing symbols of the traditions of the frontier, the black community, and music, Invisible Man achieved international fame and remains one of the most important American works of the twentieth century.

Jane Eyre

Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, published in 1847, is one of the first Bildungsromans with a female protagonist. In this Victorian English novel, the female hero is constrained by social expectations determined by gender-specific beliefs. At age ten, Jane is sent to residential school where she acquires skills she later uses as a governess and a village schoolteacher. In its use of natural elements and the supernatural, the novel is both romantic and Gothic. Jane Eyre is a Bildungsroman in that it traces Jane’s development from a dependent child to a mature and independent woman. The novel dramatizes the love affair between Jane and Edward Rochester, who is married at the time they meet. Rochester keeps his insane wife sequestered in his estate, and after she dies, he and Jane marry. Charlotte Bronte  was attracted to the married headmaster of the school in Brussels where she went to study French and to teach in 1842–1843. This unhappy experience, along with the author’s memories of early school years at Cowan’s Bridge, contributed autobiographical elements to Jane Eyre, her first published work of fiction, which was an immediate success.

Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy introduced into Victorian literature the concept of fatalism. This belief assumes that humans are subject to arbitrary and random forces, such as chance and timing, which shape their destinies. Jude the Obscure, published in 1895, received widespread criticism because it attacks the Anglican Church, the elitist admissions policies of Oxford University (called Christ minster in the novel), and the rigid laws regarding marriage. As a Bildungsroman, the maturation story follows Jude Fawley’s route to destruction from what Hardy called in his preface ‘‘the tragedy of unfulfilled aims.’’ Fawley, by trade a stonemason, has spiritual and intellectual ambitions that are thwarted by his exclusion from the university and his disastrous involvement with two women, the vulgar Arabella and the intellectual Sue. He marries the first and has one child with her; he does not marry the second, and he has two children by her. Tragedy overwhelms Jude when his oldest child kills the younger ones and hangs himself. Jude himself dies miserably, an alcoholic.

Of Human Bondage
Like so many autobiographical Bildungsromans, Of Human Bondage (1915) draws from the unhappy early years of its author, W. Somerset Maugham. A popular twentieth-century English novelist, Maugham was a physician who abandoned medicine to write plays and novels. The hero in Maugham’s most famous novel is a medical student with a clubfoot who falls in love with a promiscuous Cockney waitress. A still-admired The famous 1935 film version of this obsessive and tragic love affair starred Bette Davis and Leslie Howard.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce’s masterpiece is Ulysses, but his autobiographical Bildungsroman is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published in 1916. When Joyce’s hero Stephen Dedalus grows up, he says farewell to his home country and to his family and religion as well. The Norton Anthology of English Literature describes this novel as portraying ‘‘the parallel movement toward art and toward exile.’’ This novel of rebellion insists that the artist is an outcast and that his alienation is a necessary component of his being creative.

Sons and Lovers

Another autobiographical Bildungsroman, Sons and Lovers was D. H. Lawrence’s third and most notable novel. Published in 1913, it is the comingof- age story of PaulMorel, the son of a coal miner father and a controlling and ambitious mother who gives up on finding any fulfillment in her marriage. She turns her possessive attention to her children, especially Paul. The resulting struggle for sexual power and individual identity causes Paul difficulties in finding his professional place and establishing a healthy relationship with a woman his own age. This novel dramatizes some of the psychological points Freud explored under the label Oedipus complex.

Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship

Published in 1795 by Wolfgang von Goethe as Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, this prototype of the Bildungsroman was translated into English by Thomas Carlyle in 1824. With this book, Goethe established the Bildungsroman as a novel of personal rather than philosophical development for the main character. His hero wanders through a series of love affairs, friendships, and occupations before settling down to marriage and responsible adulthood. Goethe’s model was emulated by many notable writers and has had a strong influence on the development of the novel.

THEMES

Coming of Age and Apprenticeship

Goethe’s Bildungsroman appropriately uses the word ‘‘apprenticeship’’ in its title because one distinguishing factor of the genre is the learning process that brings the protagonist from childhood into adulthood. As a coming-of-age novel, the Bildungsroman focuses on the main character’s apprenticeship. These experiences place the character near older practitioners whose roles as models the character either emulates or rejects.

Education

The Bildungsroman is a novel of formation or development. These terms imply that the Bildungsroman is also a novel about education, yet not necessarily in the narrow sense of the Erziehungsroman (novel of educational development). Life is an education, and the process of growing up as chronicled in the Bildungsroman is a series of experiences that teach lessons. The protagonist’s education may be academic; it may also be in other areas, such as learning social graces, conducting business affairs, and gaining integrity in relationships.

Identity and the Self

The protagonist of the Bildungsroman has a unique talent. Part of the maturation process requires discovering this talent and figuring out how to use it. The journey and experiences of the hero are intended to provide an opportunity to examine the inner self and clarify important goals and how to pursue them. As part of the self-discovery, the hero gets a new perspective on his/her relationships with other people. In other words, facing the complexities of the adult world causes the protagonist to learn about others and about himself. Thus, the Bildungsroman is a psychological novel in which the main character evolves toward mature self-awareness.

Journey

In Bildungsromans the hero leaves home on a journey or quest. Usually, the protagonist leaves a rural setting to travel into the wider world of the city. In this way, the character encounters a larger society that tests his or her mettle. The physical journey initiates change, and change brings growth.

Love

Finding the right love is a component of the quest as it is enacted in the Bildungsroman. The movement into adulthood begins with separation and often resolves in maturity with adult connection. In some cases the character must negotiate among potential partners in order to discover the appropriate one. The formalization of that relationship may constitute the final event in the novel.

Search for the Meaning of Life

In the Bildungsroman, the novel of development, the hero develops through experiences that assist in clarifying the character’s mature values. Growing up involves the search for universal truths. For Victorians, the universal truths concerned achieving middle-class values, marrying, and settling down as a responsible citizen. But to writers like Joyce, these truths concerned the artist’s alienation and the necessary rejection of middle-class values.

STYLE

Audience

The Bildungsroman does not just tell a story. It involves the reader in the same process of education and development as the main character. The aim is to affect the reader’s personal growth as well. However, at some point in the narrative, the reader may be in disagreement with the protagonist. Realizing that the hero has made a mistake in judgment, the reader, in effect, learns from the situation before the protagonist or otherwise compares his/her own morality against the moral of the story that the hero eventually learns.

Character

In the Bildungsroman, the focus is on one main character. The structure of the Bildungsroman is to follow this one character from youth to adulthood. Other characters exist in the story, of course, but only in roles that have some kind of tie or relationship that contributes to the growth and development of the protagonist. With this concentration, it is then possible for the reader to become engrossed in the maturation process of the hero and learn the same life lessons.

Chronicle

A Bildungsroman is the chronicle, or record of events, of the protagonist from youth to adulthood. However, it is not an unbiased record, but more like a diary recording the life of a young person on the way to self-understanding and maturity. Consequently, the Bildungsroman uses a chronological time period to follow the hero from year to year.

Conflict

Growing up and finding one’s purpose in life is difficult. There are many pitfalls, mistakes, and
forces beyond one’s control along the way. These conflicts between the protagonist and fate, or nature, or others, or self are part of the process of maturation that the Bildungsroman chronicles. Each crisis the hero endures helps to deepen his self-knowledge and strengthen or challenge his moral fortitude. Multiple conflicts are essential to the credibility of the Bildungsroman as a reflection of the real life experience.

Dialogue

Dialogue is the conversational interaction among the characters of a story. Since the Bildungsroman is focused on the main character, plot and narrative are secondary to dialogue. Using dialogue to carry the story makes the reader feel more of a witness to an actual scene. The reader knows little more than the hero has learned from talking with others and thus makes the same discoveries as the protagonist as events happen.

MOVEMENT VARIATIONS

American Novels

The American style of the Bildungsroman is a combination of the German Bildungsroman and the Spanish picaresque. The American Bildungsroman follows the pattern of moral growth for the protagonist as he discovers his identity in conflict with social norms. Blended into the story is the picaresque element of the hero being as a traveler who has an outsider’s perspective on what he encounters. Two American classics exemplify this structure: Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

Picaresque

A picaresque novel, which is Spanish in origin, is a humorous tale about the adventures of a roguish hero. The first known picaresque was the anonymously published novel Lazarillo de Tormes (1554). The popularity of picaresque novels spread to Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as exemplified by classics such as Daniel Dafoe’s Moll Flanders (1722).

English Novels

In an English Bildungsroman, the protagonist is often a poor orphaned boy whose goal is to become a cultured gentleman of means. As part of his self-education, he moves from his provincial home to an urban setting. While the German Bildungsroman emphasizes internal conflicts within the main character, the English Bildungsroman uses the outside world to threaten the hero’s quest for identity. Many English Bildungsromans draw from the author’s own experience.

Entwickslungroman

Another name for Bildungsroman is the general term Entwickslungroman, or novel of development. This name applies to novels constructed to follow the personality development of the protagonist. However, it is sometimes reserved for only those works that describe the hero’s physical passage from youth to maturity without delving into his psychological progress. In other words, Bildungsroman-type novels that pay less attention to the hero’s intellect and emotions than more fully developed works fit into the category of Entwickslungroman.

Erziehungsroman

Meaning ‘‘novel of education,’’ this variation is a more pedagogic form of the Bildungsroman. Not only is it more concerned with the formal education and training of the protagonist, but the novel also intends to teach certain lessons about values to the reader as well.

Female Protagonist

The female protagonist of a Bildungsroman encounters problems specific to growing up female in a male-dominated world. Early female Bildungsromans with female protagonists mostly follow the traditional pattern that the mature female sees marriage as her fulfillment. Intellectual and social development is often achieved through the mentorship of a knowledgeable and sophisticated man. In some early nineteenthcentury female Bildungsromans, the female’s education occurs through an older and wiser husband. Later novels portray women entering marriage as the culmination of the mutual growth that occurs in a loving relationship. While a male protagonist in a Bildungsroman may meet his pivotal crisis in the course of his professional career, the female protagonist’s turning point may result from a romantic entanglement. Her journey of discovery may be more internal, or psychological, than that of her male counterpart.

Kunstlerroman

This form of the Bildungsroman focuses on the development of the artist. In this case, the protagonist achieves a place and opportunity inwhich to practice his or her art. Thus, graduating from apprenticeship not only ends the formative stage of life but also establishes the destiny that the hero has sought. Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and ThomasMann’s Dr. Faustus are examples of this type.

Medical Subgenre

As defined by Anne Hudson Jones for Lancet, in this subgenre

. . . a young physician, often but not always an intern or resident, sets out to find his special calling and to master his craft. Whether he journeys from city to city or from rotation to rotation within the same hospital, his quest is the same.

Two examples of this subgenre are Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith and Samuel Shem’s The House of God.

Military Subgenre

In this variation of the Bildungsroman, the protagonist enters the military as a young man. His path of discovery causes him to leave home, not necessarily for a city but for wherever the military sends him. Through the rigors of training and combat, the hero is challenged not only to find himself as a person but to find out how good he is as a soldier.

Social Protest Subgenre

The Bildungsroman may be a work of social protest when its female or male hero is a dispossessed or marginalized person. The female Bildungsroman may concern itself with gender issues in a patriarchal society, as in Jane Eyre. In other cases Bildungsromans explore the difficulties of growing up as a member of a minority group and may involve the fight for civil rights. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man belongs to this group. Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple combine female and minority issues interwoven in works of social protest.

Zeitroman

This variation of the Bildungsroman blends the development of the era in which the hero lives with his or her personal development. The protagonist thus serves as a reflection of his or her times. This type of novel provides an interesting study of the effects of historical context on character. For example, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage dramatizes the effects of being a Civil War soldier on the protagonist.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Development of the Novel

Beginning in the early eighteenth century, long narratives began to be written in prose. The modern novel developed in England with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722). These works were followed shortly by Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1747). These novels were highly episodic plot-driven stories. In Germany in 1766– 1767, Wieland wrote The History of Agathon, the first example of a Bildungsroman. Then in 1795, Goethe produced Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. The term Bildungsroman was coined in 1817 by Karl von Morgenstern but not commonly applied until about 1870. The genre flourished through the middle decades of the nineteenth century, both in England and the United States. The historical novel, developed by Sir Walter Scott, was written also by Dickens and others. The popularity of the Bildungsroman genre waned in the early twentieth century, but variations of the form continued to be written throughout the twentieth century.

Cultural Climate

In 1789, the French Revolution began, followed by the Reign of Terror from 1793 to 1794 and the Napoleonic period from 1804 until 1815. In 1798 in England, Wordsworth and Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads, the preface to which marked a literary watershed that came to be known as the beginning of the Romantic period. The Victorian Age spanned the years of Queen Victoria’s reign, from 1837 to her death in 1901. The era of greatest popularity for the Bildungsroman, the nineteenth century, thus spanned the Romantic and Victorian periods in literature. This time of economic and political turbulence saw repeated wars in Europe and social and mechanical transformations wrought by the Industrial Revolution. Germany got its first constitution in 1816. At the same time that several European countries strengthened their colonial territories.

According to the Norton Anthology of English Literature, perceptive Victorians suffered from a sense of ‘‘being displaced persons in a world made alien by technological changes which had been exploited too quickly for the adaptive powers of the human psyche.’’ With the Industrial Revolution came the rise of the middle class that gradually took control of the means of production, especially in England and the United States.Many middle-class Victorians wanted the stability of a set of rules to live by. Readers demanded guidance and edification from literature. The Bildungsroman, noted for exemplifying middle-class standards, met their needs. Often times, its hero went from the lower working class to respectability as a gentleman. Along the way, he reviewed his values and usually concluded that a settled middle-class lifestyle was the best choice.

By the end of the Victorian period, writers were seeking more realism. Victorian values and self-assurance gave way to pessimism and stoicism. The French promoted a bohemian lifestyle that scoffed at notions of respectability. Novelists began experimenting with the time structure of their works, and stream-of-consciousness began to be written. As a genre so tied to convention, German influence, and orderly chronology, the Bildungsroman lost popularity as twentieth-century literary interests and innovations led elsewhere. Still, James Joyce chose the Bildungsroman form for his masterpiece A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916, and the genre is still popular.


CRITICAL OVERVIEW

Regarding Bildungsromans, critics discuss whether novels other than the German ones written in the strict tradition of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship qualify as examples of the genre. Purists argue that the Bildungsroman is so intertwined with German philosophical and literary heritage that the form does not occur in other languages. Others find common elements in many novels. It is commonly held that Goethe’s novel had widespread influence. For example, Ehrhard Bahr wrote for the Reference Guide to World Literature:

Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship had a great influence on the Romantics and the history of the German novel. It provided, so to speak, the blueprint for all subsequent German novels. Early commentaries on the novel occur in correspondence between Friedrich Schiller and Goethe, in the letters by Wilhelm von Humboldt and Christian Gottfried Korner, and in Friedrich Schlegel’s 1798 essay ‘‘On Goethe’s Meister.’’ Goethe’s novel became a prime example of Romanticism.

Thomas Carlyle, a highly influential British historian, writer, and social critic, thought so much of Goethe’s Bildungsroman that he translated the work in 1824 and also wrote a parody of it. After Carlyle, other English writers took up the genre. The great twentieth-century German novelist, Thomas Mann, also wrote a Bildungsroman (The Magic Mountain) and considered Goethe’s novel one of the three greatest events of that era alongside the French Revolution and publication of Fichte’s Theory of Science. Without doubt, it was a popular form of the novel in the nineteenth century, but when World War I began and critics continued to link the genre to the German tradition, it faded in popularity. Two studies of the Bildungsroman areMartin Swales’s The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse and Jerome Hamilton Buckley’s Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding. The first book argues that the genre is purely German; the second book finds a number of Bildungsromans in English literature. The contrast between these two important critical works summarizes the debate over the Bildungsroman. Those who believe that the genre is used in other cultures often re-examine novels classified under other genres to prove the influence of the Bildungsroman on structure. Regarding the genre, critics analyze Scott’s Waverly, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, and Plath’s The Bell Jar. Some critics assign particular books to the genre; others specify subgenre based on certain characteristics—comic, female, black, Chicano, etc. Others debate whether early female bildungsroman can be called feminist. In an 1995 article for Essays in Literature, Denise Kohn argues that Jane Austen’s novel Emma is, in fact, a Bildungsroman because the titular character learns to grow into her role as a lady. Emma is also a feminist novel because Austen’s notions about what traits define ladyship emphasize intelligence and compassion over passivity.
Bernard Selinger, in a 1999 article for Modern Fiction Studies, says that the Bildungsroman continues to interest both authors and critics. In his opinion, critics of the genre tend to move between seeing the genre as concerned with the integration of the hero into society or with regarding the hero as alienated. This kind of criticism reflects the flexibility of the genre in the hands of skilled novelists throughout the literary world who know that each person’s development has its own outcome.



 
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Odysseus,  

thank u so much valuable information

I will be back after concentrate on it in order to discuss

thanx again

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