This German word has been adopted in English literary criticism to refer to a novel of transition, the plot of which follows a protagonist from childhood or adolescence to adulthood. Novels of this sort frequently follow the outline of the author’s autobiography, but they may also depend on imaginative inventions.

The earliest example of the genre is generally considered to be Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796). The protagonist of a bildungsroman may serve a literal or symbolic apprenticeship in the course of the novel; as a result of the plot’s effects on his or her character, the protagonist matures and discovers a suitable role in life. The structure of a bildungsroman particularly highlights the character-forming episodes that shape a malleable young psyche into a mature personality, for better or worse.

Related, more specialized terms include Künstlerroman, the novel that examines the growth and development of an artist, especially with respect to the artist’s particular giftedness, and Erziehungsroman, the novel devoted to a young person’s education. See A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce for an example of the Künstlerroman, or The Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake (or any volume in the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling) for an example of the Erziehungsroman in the subgenre of fantasy literature.

Phrases used synonymously with bildungsroman include apprenticeship novel, novel of development, and novel of formation.

Classic examples of the 20th-century bildungsroman include The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler and Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham. When the protagonist of a bildungsroman is a young woman, the story may focus on her growing experience with and understanding of romance. Such a story may be comic or lighthearted, like I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, or Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons; alternatively, the young woman’s bildungsroman may be a serious or even a disastrous story, like the five-volume Children of Violence series by Doris Lessing, or The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen, or the earlier parts of The Country Girls Trilogy by Edna O’Brien.

A more specialized type of bildungsroman is the novel that relates the awakening of a young man’s or woman’s awareness of nonheterosexual desire: The Swimming Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst narrates the growth of a young man’s recognition of his homosexuality, making an interesting contrast to the story of a young woman’s discovery of her lesbian nature in The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall.

Bibliography
Abel, Elizabeth, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland. The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1983.
Buckley, Jerome Hamilton. Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974.
Fraiman, Susan. Unbecoming Women: British Woman Writers and the Novel of Development. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
Hardin, James N. Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991.

Categories: British Literature, Literary Terms and Techniques, Literature, Novel Analysis

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