1. READ GUIDELINES BELOW)read the article (Lost and Found: The Fall of Grace in SONNY’S BLUES) summarize at least a page including work cited everything should be from the article nothing else 2. prov

The Bildungsroman

In the entry for “Bildungsroman” from the Critical Survey of Long Fiction (2010), Richard Hauer Costa defines and traces the history of this popular genre of fiction. The word is of German origin, from “Bildung,” which means “personal growth”, and “roman”, which means “novel”. A bildungsroman is a coming-of-age story, a story about growing up, losing innocence, and becoming an adult. It narrates, according to Costa, “what happens when innocence confronts forces, human or cosmic, that are not innocent.” Costa asserts that, in a bildungsroman, “the conflicts of life appear as the necessary growth points through which the individual must pass on his way to maturity and harmony.” Bildungsromans may also be called “life-novels”, “spiritual autobiographies”, “education novels”, or “apprenticeship novels”.

The bildungsroman usually narrates several stages of the protagonist’s life as he/she experiences things that cause them to grow up and become an adult. The first stage is innocence. The middle stages are about the innocent protagonist confronting experience, and the last stage is the resolution of the protagonist as a more mature person who has learned from his/her experience.

Although older texts fit this definition (including Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex), the term was first used in 1870 by a German literary historian to describe the German novelist Goethe’s novel, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. The term then seems to have fallen out of use for some time. In 1942, a British literary scholar resurrected the term and applied it to many European and British novels that share the subject of growing up. The term stuck at this point and became a popular and familiar term in many languages to refer to this type of story.

In the 19th century, such British writers as William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy wrote bildungsroman that are now considered classics. Many literary scholars consider Dickens’ Great Expectations to be a prime example of the bildungsroman, as well as one of the best known.

In the 20th century, D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce, among other writers, brought the bildungsroman into the modern age by using more modern writing techniques and by addressing the concerns of the modern age. They often concern the development of the individual and his/her emotional reactions against traditional and social expectations. Subjects like sexuality, science and Darwinism, industrialization, economic and class issues, religion, and the role of the artist in society are explored in these novels. Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is also a critically acclaimed example of a bildungsroman.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, American writers like Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn, Ernest Hemingway in the Nick Adams stories, and J.D. Salinger in The Catcher in the Rye adopted the bildungsroman for an American audience, and these writers deal with coming of age amongst uniquely American situations and themes.

This genre of novel continues to be written in our current times addressing more current concerns. Many contemporary writers have used the bildungsroman to explore the personal development of characters who face specific challenges as they mature, leading to feminist bildungsroman, coming-out novels, and novels that detail the quest for ethnic and cultural identity by postcolonial, disenfranchised, oppressed, immigrant, and other marginalized peoples. Examples of these types of bildungsroman include The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, and Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.

Costa argues that “The bildungsroman continues as an important form into the twenty-first century, accompanied by a new, intense interest in the memoir. Readers cannot get enough of stories—whether fictional or true—about the struggle for adulthood and selfhood.”

Work Cited

Costa, Richard Hauer. "The Bildungsroman." Critical Survey Of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition (2010): 1-8. MagillOnLiterature Plus. Web. 29 Aug. 2016.