Richard Salmon
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199560615
- eISBN:
- 9780191803499
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199560615.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter analyzes the formation of the Bildungsroman in nineteenth-century British fiction. The term Bildungsroman is synonymous with a type of novel known as the ‘novel of education’, which ...
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This chapter analyzes the formation of the Bildungsroman in nineteenth-century British fiction. The term Bildungsroman is synonymous with a type of novel known as the ‘novel of education’, which traces the development of an individual protagonist from childhood or adolescence to the maturity of early adult life. In its original German context, the word refers to a specific cultural ideal or praxis — that of Bildung, commonly translated as the idea of self-cultivation or self-formation. From the late nineteenth century onwards, Goethe's influential novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–6), first translated into English by Thomas Carlyle as Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship in 1824, was routinely cited as the founding example of the Bildungsroman as a distinct novelistic form. Many British novelists of the period 1820 to 1880 were directly or indirectly influenced by German ideas about the cultivation of the self, which they associated with the work of Goethe in particular.Less
This chapter analyzes the formation of the Bildungsroman in nineteenth-century British fiction. The term Bildungsroman is synonymous with a type of novel known as the ‘novel of education’, which traces the development of an individual protagonist from childhood or adolescence to the maturity of early adult life. In its original German context, the word refers to a specific cultural ideal or praxis — that of Bildung, commonly translated as the idea of self-cultivation or self-formation. From the late nineteenth century onwards, Goethe's influential novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–6), first translated into English by Thomas Carlyle as Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship in 1824, was routinely cited as the founding example of the Bildungsroman as a distinct novelistic form. Many British novelists of the period 1820 to 1880 were directly or indirectly influenced by German ideas about the cultivation of the self, which they associated with the work of Goethe in particular.
