This article has multiple issues. Please help improve the article or discuss these issues on the talk page. It is missing citations or footnotes. Please help improve it by adding inline citations. Tagged since May 2008. It needs additional references or sources for verification. Tagged since May 2008. It may contain original research or unverifiable claims. Tagged since May 2008.

A bildungsroman (German pronunciation: [ˈbɪldʊŋs.roˌmaːn]; German: "novel of education") is a coming-of-age kind of novel. It arose during the German Enlightenment. In it, the author presents the psychological, moral and social shaping of the personality of a character, usually the protagonist. The term Bildungsroman was coined by Johann Carl Simon Morgenstern.^[1]

[edit] Features

The bildungsroman generally takes the following course^[2]:

• The protagonist grows from child to adult.

• The protagonist has a reason to embark upon his or her journey. A loss or some discontent must, at an early stage, jar him or her away from the home or family setting.

• The process of maturation is long, arduous and gradual, involving repeated clashes between the hero's (protagonist's) needs and desires and the views and judgments enforced by an unbending social order. This conflict bears some similarity to Sigmund Freud's concept of the pleasure principle versus the reality principle; a prominent example is the book A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.

• Eventually, the spirit and values of the social order become manifested in the protagonist, who is ultimately incorporated 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 genres other than the bildungsroman can include elements of it as prominent parts of their story lines. For example, a military story might show a raw recruit receiving a baptism by fire and becoming a battle-hardened soldier, while a high-fantasy quest story may show a transformation from an adolescent protagonist into an adult who is aware of his or her lineage or powers. Neither of those genres or stories, however, corresponds exactly to the bildungsroman.

[edit] Select examples

This is by no means a complete list of Bildungsroman works. Instead, it's a partial list, chronological, that includes selections widely acknowledged to be representative of the genre.

• Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, by Ibn Tufail (1100s), a precursor of the genre ^[3]
• Candide, by Voltaire (1759)^[4]
• Emile: or, On Education, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762)
• Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the paragon of the genre (1795–96)
• 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)
• Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson (1881-82)
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (1884)
• Captains Courageous, by Rudyard Kipling (1897)
• A Room with a View, by E. M. Forster (1908)
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce (1914–15)
• Of Human Bondage, by W. Somerset Maugham (1915)
• The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather (1915)
• Demian, by Hermann Hesse (1919)
• Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse (1922)
• The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann (1924)
• All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque (1928)
• Pather Panchali, by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay (1929)
• Aparajita, by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay (1931)
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951)^[5]
• Go Tell it on the Mountain (novel), by James Baldwin (1953)^[6]
• Starman Jones by Robert A. Heinlein (1953)
• The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham (1955)
• The Tin Drum, by Günter Grass (1959)
• A Separate Peace, by John Knowles (1959)
• Goodbye, Columbus, by Philip Roth (1959)^[7]
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)
• Davy by Edgar Pangborn (1964)
• Out of the Shelter by David Lodge (1970)
• Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya (1972)
• Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie (1981)
• Lanark: A Life in Four Books, by Alasdair Gray (1981)
• Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy (1985)
• Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson (1985)^[8]
• The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay (1989)
• The Buddha of Suburbia, by Hanif Kureishi (1990)
• The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson (1995)
• Black Swan Green,by David Mitchell (author) (1996)
• The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd (2002)^[9]

[edit] See also

• Coming of age

[edit] References

[edit] Literature

• Abrams, M. H. (2005). Glossary of Literary Terms (Eighth Edition ed.). Boston: Thomson Wadsworth. ISBN 1413002188. 
• Engel, Manfred: 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.
• Jeffers, Thomas L. (2005). Apprenticeships: The Bildungsroman from Goethe to Santayana. New York: Palgrave. ISBN 1403966079. 
• Minden, Michael: The German Bildungsroman: Incest and Inheritance. Cambridge: CUP 1997.