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Dickens is the one author who embodies the Englishness of novels. He wrote novels that inspired the nation. They were mostly centred in the city. He portrayed ordinary people as heroes. Most of the popular characters that he used were those who lived in London. Another feature of his work is the division of public and private spheres. Dickens perceived the English state as becoming consumed with the corruption of its institutions and a resistance to social change. Novels that deal with male Bildungsroman are also discussed in the chapter. These novels typically portray young men from the province who eventually grow up and discover their role in society. A famous example of this kind of work is Dick Whittington, an ordinary boy who eventually became a rich city merchant. The chapter ends by discussing this idea in detail.

This chapter introduces the central concern of the book: how to recognise and to think cogently about the limits of humanistic pedagogy. It does so by explaining two continuing motifs; the pedagogical circle is used by analogy with the hermeneutic circle. Whereas the hermeneutic circle suggests a possibly self-fulfilling process whereby interpretation is unwittingly governed by its necessary premises, the pedagogical circle sees a similarly closed logic in guided instruction, but now exacerbated by the factor of authority. The result of such instruction may be the ‘open secret’: a truth or recognition which, even as it is frankly imparted and is apparently understood, remains a secret because the listener does not yet possess the necessary experience. The remainder of the chapter provides an anticipatory summary of the argument, including the modern genesis of the Bildungsroman in the era of the philosophical tale and the novel of sentiment.

This chapter provides an exposition of Rousseau's Emile in relation to the question of pedagogy's intrinsic blindness to the limits of its own authority. In its successive drafts, Rousseau's treatise was increasingly novelised and is commonly referred to as a novel. That Rousseau should have turned to novelistic methods reflects the important affinity between the educational process and the novel form and he gives many principled suggestions which were to be taken up in the later tradition of the Bildungsroman, including his central principle of delay, his utopianism, and his historical contextualising. But Emile is not itself a novel, and indeed remains blind to what might be at stake in the slippage of categories between educational treatise and fiction. This slippage denotes Rousseau's significant blindness to the question of authority: he cannot recognise how imaginary is his own exercise of authority in the text.

The chapter begins with Carlyle’s landmark translation of Wilhelm Meister and its preface, which singles Mignon out for lyrical praise. It then passes to Walter Scott’s romance Peveril of the Peak, published in the same decade, where the character Fenella is explicitly based on Mignon. Three of Bulwer Lytton’s experiments in the Bildungsroman, all of which have characters belonging to the Mignon family, and which exhibit a combination of high moral tone and exotic fantasy, represent the next phase of Mignon’s naturalization in Britain. Subsequently, the interest of George Eliot and George Henry Lewes in Goethe’s novel, first displayed publicly in the 1850s, forms the prelude to a discussion of Caterina (in ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’) and Mirah (in Daniel Deronda) as complex responses to Mignon’s story. The later spread of the Mignon craze to England is charted via a number of popular novels by women writers.

Adoption fiction flourished in the mid-nineteenth century, reflecting a new republican conception of family as a nonhierarchical grouping of individuals whose will to be together is as important as blood ties. Writers enlisted the trope of adoption to set the terms upon which a white middle class would develop. The little known novel, Laura Huntley, by Maria Browne (1850), addresses anxieties about immigration and urbanization through a couple’s adoption of an abandoned infant. The novel also reflects changes in child rearing practices and the shift from Calvinist to more sentimental theology when Laura’s adoptive parents curb her misbehavior and guide her to meet expectations for piety, obedience, and respect consonant with those of the developing nation.

Edith Wharton’s Summer (1917) signals the death of romantic myths of adoption and nation building. Rescued from a renegade Mountain community, Charity bears a name ironically referencing acts of child saving in nineteenth-century adoption narratives. Reflecting the novel’s World War I context, Charity’s is a refugee, then a rebel, as she copes first with adoption by and then with marriage to her adoptive father after a brief love affair leaves her pregnant. Charity’s decision to raise rather than abort or abandon her child anticipates twentieth-century issues facing birth mothers, just as her marked ethnicity positions the novel in a larger dialogue about nationhood, race, and eugenics. Charity improves the quality of her lineage and implicitly of the nation but loses her bid for autonomy.

This chapter focuses on the Bildungsroman, studying the philosophical and literary significance of the novel of development. Through readings of Margaret Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks (1866), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, and John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, it suggests that the ethical foundations of the concept of Bildung—and in particular the idea of sensus communis (common sense)—made form in the Bildungsroman, lay the groundwork for one's own understanding of what makes a novel count as an object of study. The operating principle in the narrative structure of the Bildungsroman is the discovery that one is already a member of a community, and that one's decisions can be understood as stemming from that community. Proper cultivation means the development of a character that can understand and respond to the pre-existing, yet unconscious, shared consensus: the sensus communis. This sort of reciprocity between individual and community is actually a better description of how moral intuition worked, at its more refined levels, than references to physical sensation.

This chapter assesses Germaine de Staël's reckoning with the “new genres or sub-genres characteristic of realism,” the Bildungsroman and its British analogues, the Anglo-Irish national tale and Scottish historical novel, formed in the “novelistic revolution” of European Romanticism. Modeling the scientific conception of human nature as a developmental entity or emergent phenomenon, these new genres or subgenres rehearse a universal formation of species being—a Bildung der Humanität—through the ontogenetic narrative of subject formation. Staël's broad target is the structural exclusion of women from the category that underwrites the new forms of the novel: the Enlightenment's grand universal particular, “man.” And yet, excluded from the new conception of humanity, women were most fully expressive of it. Where men are fixed in a social taxonomy, like animals in the system of nature, women possess the plasticity and fluidity, the capacity to move up and down the scale of being, that are specific markers of the human in late Enlightenment anthropology.

This chapter establishes the need for Irish Studies to look beyond the geo-social space of Ireland. By emphasising the central cultural role Paris plays in nineteenth-century literature, it demonstrates the significance the city should play in studies of nineteenth-century Irish literature. This focus on Paris establishes the book’s key lines of inquiry: the connection between the city, economics, self-determination, and the capitalist Bildungsroman.

As a literary fairy tale, Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Little Lame Prince and His Travelling Cloak: A Parable for Young and Old (1874) employs a fantasy setting and magical circumstances to depict the moral, psychological, and physical development of its hero, Prince Dolor. The hybrid story combines fairy tale, Bildungsroman, and parable, defies conventional narrative closure, and produces incongruous understandings of disability. The story’s narrative trajectory moves towards closure, first reinforcing Dolor’s physical deviance and the eradicating it through magical prosthetic gifts; as such, the outer structure creates a story of disability as abnormal, restricting, and in need of compensation if not cure. However, by making readers aware first of the narrator’s physical limitations and of their own roles as spectators, and then by focalizing through the disabled hero while he is a spectator, The Little Lame Prince undermines its earlier use of Dolor as a sentimental spectacle. Moreover, moments in which readers focalize with Dolor through his magical prostheses reveal the limitations of all bodies and speculate on the beauty and infinite variety of physical difference. These colliding views of disability in The Little Lame Prince exhibit the complex, shifting role of the body in Victorian thought.

This book is about the legibility of human rights; about the literary, political, and juridical effects of transcribing into international legal conventions what the ancient Greeks regarded as unwritten law; about the tensions and gap between what everyone knows and what everyone should know; about how norms of legal obviousness manifest in literary forms; and about how, in an era of intense globalization, those legal and literary forms cooperate to disseminate and legitimate the norms of human rights, to make each other's common sense legible and compelling. The book elaborates the conceptual vocabulary, deep narrative grammar, and humanist social vision that human rights law shares with the Bildungsroman in their cooperative efforts to imagine, normalize, and realize what the Universal Declaration and early theorists of the novel call “the free and full development of the human personality.”.

The United Nations delegates' encryption of Robinson Crusoe within the text of Article 29 of Universal Declaration of Human Rights, illustrates something of the historical cooperation between the novel and human rights between what is typically regarded as the sociocultural work of literature and the civil and political work of law. This chapter focuses on the formal, historical, rhetorical, and institutional conditions of international human rights law that make it especially dependent upon cultural forms to give its precepts moral force. It begins by analyzing the image of the human person, and the development of its personality, that the law both takes for granted and articulates, situating this figure at the intersection of natural and positive law approaches to personhood. Abstract rhetorical structures of the law in the chapter become most technically refined and commonly legible in the literary conventions of the Bildungsroman.