(Major Field) The European Bildungsroman

RATIONALE What is a Bildungsroman? In my examination, I will attempt to answer this misleadingly simple question. The term was suggested by Friedrich von Blanckenburg's discussion of Bildung in his 1774 "Essay on the Novel," coined by Karl Morgenstern in the 1820s, and popularized by Wilhelm Dilthey in his 1870 essay on Friedrick Schleiermacher. Therefore, when we 20th Century readers talk of the Bildungsroman, as we often do, we employ a critical lens honed in 19th Century Germany to treat a genre begun in the 18th Century. One result of this critical distance is the conceptual indistinctness of the term. Bildungsroman is often used as a collective term to designate several potential genres: Entwicklungsroman or "novel of development," Erziehungsroman or "novel of education," and Kunstlerroman or "novel about the artist." My major field, European Bildungsroman, includes novels that could serve as examples of these various forms: Rousseau's Emile, and even Fielding's Tom Jones as novels of education; Diderot's Rameau's Nephew, James' Roderick Hudson, and Joyce's Portrait as novels about artists; Austen's Emma, and even James' Ambassadors as novels of development. Most of the novels I select have featured in other critical discussions of the Bildungsroman by critics such as Martin Swales, Franco Moretti, and Lorna Ellis. My particular approach to defining the genre, however, returns to Dilthey's original definition. According to Dilthey, the prototypical Bildungsroman is Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship in which the hero engages in a double task of self-integration and integration into society. For Dilthey, the first implies the second, and thus he reads the Bildungsroman as a fundamentally affirmative, conservative genre, confident in the validity of the society it depicts, and anxious to lead both hero and reader to a productive place in that society. 1 maintain that if we accept Dilthey's definition of the Bildungsroman, then we cannot be confident that even Wilhelm Meister deserves the label. Nor is it clear that the term, so defined, applies to any of the novels I have selected. What is more accurate, I will argue, is that Wilhelm Meister articulates a tension in Dilthey's double task, that is, a conflict between the priorities of self-integration and social integration, a tension between what Goethe himself called Vollen (desire and its fulfillment) and Sollen (social obligation and its fulfillment). If there is a criterion for the Bildungsroman genre, it is this tension, which presents itself on different levels, a tension to which authors respond with vastly different strategies, from Austen's attempt to mitigate it, to Flaubert's and James' efforts to exacerbate it.

PRIMARY READINGS Defoe, Daniel (1660-1731) — Robinson Crusoe (1719) Fielding, Henry (1707-54) — Tom Jones (1749) Diderot, Denis (1713-84) — Le neveu de Rameau (1761) Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-78) — Emile (1762) Burke, Edmund (1729-97) — Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) Austen, Jane (1775-1817) — Sense and Sensibility (1811) — Pride and Prejudice (1813) — Mansfield Park (1814) — Emma (1816) — Northhanger Abbey (1818) — Persuasion (1818) — Sanditon (1817) Scott, Sir Walter (1771-1832) — Waverley (1814) Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749-1832) — Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774) — Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjarhre (1795-6) Stendhal (Henri Beyle, 1783-1842) — Le Rouge et le noir (1830) — La Chartreuse de Parme (1839) Balzac, Honore de (1799-1850) — Pere Goriot (1834) — Illusions perdues (1837-43) Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811-1863) — Vanity Fair (1847-8) Brontë, Charlotte (1816-55) — Jane Eyre (1847) — Villette (1853) Dickens, Charles John Huffman (1812-70) — Oliver Twist (1837-38) — Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9) — Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-4) — David Copperfield (1849-50) — Little Dorrit (1855-7) — Great Expectations (1860-1) Eliot, George (Mary Ann, later Marian Evans, 1819-1880) — Middlemarch (1871-2) — Daniel Deronda (1874-6) Flaubert, Gustave (1821-1880) — Madame Bovary (1857) — L'Education sentimentale (1869) Hardy, Thomas (1840-1928) — Jude the Obscure (1895) James, Henry (1843-1916) — Roderick Hudson (1877) — Daisy Miller (1879) — Washington Square (1880) — Portrait of a Lady (1881) — The Ambassadors (1903) — "The Beast in the Jungle" (1903) Wharton, Edith (née Newbold Jones 1862-1937) — The House of Mirth (1905) Mann, Thomas (1875-1955) — Buddenbrooks (1901) — Zauberberg (1924) Lawrence, David Herbert (1885-1930) — Sons and Lovers (1913) Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius (1882-1941) — A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914-5)