Bildungsroman
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A bildungsroman (IPA /ˈbɪldʊŋs.roˌmaːn/, German: "novel of education" or "novel of formation") is a novel which traces the spiritual, moral, psychological, or social development and growth of the main character from (usually) childhood to maturity.
Description of genre
A bildungsroman is generally defined as the story of a single individual's growth and development within the context of a defined social order. The growth process, at its roots a quest story, has been described as both "an apprenticeship to life" and a "search for meaningful existence within society."Among the components of a bildungsroman:
- To spur the hero or heroine on to their journey, some form of loss or discontent must jar them at an early stage away from the home or family setting.
- The process of maturity is long, arduous, and gradual, consisting of repeated clashes between the protagonist's needs and desires and the views and judgments enforced by an unbending social order.
- Eventually, the spirit and values of the social order become manifest in the protagonist, who is then accommodated into society. The novel ends with an assessment by the protagonist of himself/herself and his/her new place in that society.
Many other genres include a bildungsroman as a prominent part of their story lines; for example, a military story frequently shows a raw recruit receiving his/her baptism of fire and becoming a battle-hardened soldier. A high fantasy quest may also show a transformation from an adolescent protagonist into an adult aware of his/her powers or lineage.
Prominent examples
- Thomas Hughes' "Tom Brown's Schooldays"
- Henry Fielding's Tom Jones
- Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy
- Charles Dickens' David Copperfield
- Charles Dickens' Great Expectations
- Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
- Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- C. S. Forester's Mr. Midshipman Hornblower
- Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird
- Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
- J. D. Salinger's ''The Catcher in the Rye
- Richard Fariña's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me
- Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
- Bryce Courtenay's The Power of One
- Herman Hesse's Siddharta
- Herman Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund
- George Santayana's The Last Puritan
- Jane Austen's Emma
- William Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage
- Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre
- Gottfried Keller's Green Henry
- Adalbert Stifter's Indian Summer
- Michael Frayn's Spies
- George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire
- Lee Smith's Fair and Tender Ladies
- Jens Peter Jacobsen's Niels Lyhne
- Ferdinand Bordewijk's
Films
Although by definition a bildungsroman story is in book form, many such books have been translated to film.Films exhibiting the bildungsroman form are listed here, showing the character and the actor playing the role. They include:
- Lili (Leslie Caron) in Lili
- Gigi (Leslie Caron) in Gigi
- Katsushiro (Isao Kimura) in Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai)
- Andrew Largeman (Zach Braff) in Garden State
- Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) in The Graduate
- Chico (Horst Buchholz) in The Magnificent Seven
- Will Hunting (Matt Damon) in Good Will Hunting
- Scout (Mary Badham) and Jem (Phillip Alford) in To Kill a Mockingbird
- Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader (Jake Lloyd, Hayden Christensen, David Prowse, the voice of James Earl Jones and Sebastian Shaw) in the Star Wars saga.
- Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman) in Rushmore
- William Lee (Peter Weller) in Naked Lunch
- William Miller (Patrick Fugit) in Almost Famous
- Cher Horowitz (Alicia Silverstone) in Clueless - an adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma
- Danny Boodmann T. D. Lemons Nineteen Hundred (Tim Roth) in Legend of 1900
- Naruto of the anime series Naruto
See also
See Buckley, Jerome H. Season of Youth (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1974) and Jeffers, Thomas L. Apprenticeships: The Bildungsroman from Goethe to Santayana (New York: Palgrave, 2005).
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