Bildungsroman

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a German term meaning novel of formation or novel of education, denoting a literary genre that traces the psychological, moral, and social development of a protagonist from youth through the formative experiences that shape their adult identity and worldview; the genre originated in the German literary tradition with Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship in 1795-96 and includes canonical examples such as Charles Dickens's David Copperfield and Great Expectations, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; the Bildungsroman typically involves the protagonist leaving home, encountering a series of formative relationships and challenges, suffering disillusionment, and arriving at a mature accommodation with society and the self; postcolonial and feminist critics have examined how the genre's assumptions about individual development and social integration encode specifically European, masculine, and bourgeois values that writers from other traditions have both adopted and subverted