The traditional Bildungsroman that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th Century embodied the concept of progress and the belief in the Enlightenment ideals of universality, knowledge and the search for truth. In the classic model of the genre the values of the society represented, those of modernity, are ultimately legitimized. In this dissertation, I argue that the female Bildungsroman of Ángeles Mastretta and Carmen Boullosa respond to a fundamentally postmodern aesthetics and ideological framework. In their novels, “Arráncame la vida” (1985), “Antes” (1989), “Mal de amores” (1995) and “Treinta años” (1999), the Mexican writers challenge the legitimacy of the modern ideals of progress and individual maturity that characterized the traditional, European, male Bildungsroman. These texts reject the essentialist and utopian representation of progressive personal growth and achievement that would invariably lead to a fixed state of maturity. My study of Mastretta’s and Boullosa’s representations of the Bildung process draws on postmodern theories such as those proposed by Jean-François Lyotard, Linda Hutcheon and Zygmunt Bauman, among others. Their protagonists’ subversive and contestatory attitudes toward many of modernity’s most disseminated master narratives –the traditional concept of maturity, of a coherent sense of self and of childhood and adolescence as steps toward a definitive personal identity, suggest a revision of the traditional principles of the genre. In the context of contemporary Mexican society, these texts ultimately suggest the inadequacy of the conventional form of the coming of age novel to represent the process of individual development. In postmodern Mexico, as this study demonstrates, the referents of modernity have lost their hegemonic value and therefore, the conventional model of the coming of age novel must be reinvented. The implications of the novelists’ reconceptualization of the genre are twofold; on the one hand, it suggests an emancipatory defiance of the modern concepts of individual progress and perfectibility, while on the other, it demands a high degree of tolerance toward the ambiguous and plural nature of postmodern representations of women’s formative journeys.

Zugl.: Münster (Westfalen), Univ., Diss., 2007

Zugl.: Diss., 2001

Überarb. zugl.: Diss., 2001.

<p>Jane Austen wrote her novels over two hundred years ago. Today many people, especially women, are still affected by them and her characters. She has become famous through her romantic novels where she writes about young women during the late 18^th century who spend their days drinking tea and socializing in order to find a man, marry him and live happily ever after. Even though Austen writes romance and her novels remind the reader of fairy tales, she also focuses on presenting important passages and events that occur in these young women’s lives.</p><p>Many of the novels Austen has written have features of a so-called Bildungsroman; a</p><p>novel about education which refers to a character’s growth and self-development. The structure of a Bildungsroman often includes the main character, the protagonist, going on a long journey or quest in search of the meaning of life. In this essay I will analyse the heroine’s education in Austen’s two novels <em>Northanger Abbey </em>and <em>Mansfield Park</em> and how Austen educates the reader with these novels.</p><p>The purpose of this essay is to show that the heroines in <em>Northanger Abbey</em> and <em>Mansfield Park</em> under a long period of time receive moral education through different people and events during their lives. However, it is not only the characters that are educated, my opinion is that the reader is educated as well. Both the reader and the heroines are taught that happiness can only be achieved by good education and high moral standards. I will use some of the features of a Bildungsroman, such as journey, self-development, obstacles and maturity and by examining these features in the novels, I will support my thesis.</p>

Jane Austen wrote her novels over two hundred years ago. Today many people, especially women, are still affected by them and her characters. She has become famous through her romantic novels where she writes about young women during the late 18th century who spend their days drinking tea and socializing in order to find a man, marry him and live happily ever after. Even though Austen writes romance and her novels remind the reader of fairy tales, she also focuses on presenting important passages and events that occur in these young women’s lives. Many of the novels Austen has written have features of a so-called Bildungsroman; a novel about education which refers to a character’s growth and self-development. The structure of a Bildungsroman often includes the main character, the protagonist, going on a long journey or quest in search of the meaning of life. In this essay I will analyse the heroine’s education in Austen’s two novels Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park and how Austen educates the reader with these novels. The purpose of this essay is to show that the heroines in Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park under a long period of time receive moral education through different people and events during their lives. However, it is not only the characters that are educated, my opinion is that the reader is educated as well. Both the reader and the heroines are taught that happiness can only be achieved by good education and high moral standards. I will use some of the features of a Bildungsroman, such as journey, self-development, obstacles and maturity and by examining these features in the novels, I will support my thesis.

This thesis examines the feminine coming-of-age stories in The Mill on the Floss and Hard Times and seeks to redefine coming-of-age for Victorian girls as a movement into personal agency. The traditional bildungsroman has been defined in a way that largely excludes the experiences and stories of girls born during the early nineteenth century. Because these girls lacked the options and choices of their male counterparts, it becomes important to redefine what coming-of-age means when there are limited opportunities for personal growth. The middle-class Victorian woman led a largely prescribed existence and her well-being and security was often directly and indirectly tied to the status and conduct of the men in her life, usually her father. Given this, this paper also explores the father’s role in his daughter’s coming-of-age story and how he influences the choices she makes in her life.

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Thesis advisor: Robert Lehman / The scholarship surrounding the anglophone Bildungsroman has been to this point largely divided by national and periodized boundaries. This approach to the coming-of-age novel highlights tightly-knit clusters of texts that share geospatial contexts but precludes the possibility that texts from outside these demarcated groupings share essential features that might transcend the borders of nations and literary periods. In the supposed age of literary cosmopolitanism, it is perhaps time for a new approach to the Bildungsroman. I contest that, by approaching various Bildungsromane on the level of their form and structure, new constellations of texts emerge that bring forth new questions and challenges to the conventional narrative of the rise and fall of the Bildungsroman throughout the long history of the novel globally. Each of the texts I discuss fuses a common literary form–the oral tale, the Gothic, literary naturalism, the national allegory–with the coming-of-age novel which inflects and informs its familiar plot, creating cross-cultural and cross-temporal patterns as practitioners of the genre take it up in vastly different circumstances and contexts.  Each manifestation of these hybrid Bildungsromane represents new fields on which the experimental potentialities for individual subjectivity and agency in modernity might ensue, from the early 1840s to the turn of the twenty-first century. In texts which incorporate the chronotope of the oral tale, I argue that authors use the genre to create space for individual agency in a globalizing world. In the inclusion of the Gothic, I suggest, the Bildungsroman resituates the human on the periphery of the text, thrumming with increasingly animate places and things that crowd the individual subject out of her own development. I then question the entropy spirals present in literary naturalism as they temper and trouble the linear development plot, and offer insights into texts that use this fused form to preclude Bildung and texts that use the forces of naturalism to create subterranean structural narratives that reassert its latent potential. I then take the national allegory, a genre with a complex relationship to the Bildungsroman, and argue that the individual subject comes to hold an almost mythic position which comes to be either dissolved or monstrously reasserted in dark reflections of late colonial and postcolonial national imaginations. Finally, I argue that through fantastical realism, a utopian formal play emerges in the narration of the Bildungsroman that creates the narrative space for unique representations of multilayered, open-ended identities at the end of the text. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2024. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

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