The German Bildungsroman From Wieland To Hesse

Although some of the most distinguished German novels written since about 1770 are generally considered to be Bildungsromane, the term Bildungsroman is all too frequently used in English without an awareness of the tradition from which it arose. Professor Swales concentrates on the roles of plot, characterization, and narrative commentary in novels by Wieland, Goethe, Stifter, Keller, Mann, and Hesse. By pointing out that the goal in each work is both elusive and problematic, he suggests a previously unsuspected ironic intent. His analysis adds to our awareness of the potentialities inherent in the novel. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Although some of the most distinguished German novels written since about 1770 are generally considered to be Bildungsromane, the term Bildungsroman is all too frequently used in English without an awareness of the tradition from which it arose. Professor Swales concentrates on the roles of plot, characterization, and narrative commentary in novels by Wieland, Goethe, Stifter, Keller, Mann, and Hesse. By pointing out that the goal in each work is both elusive and problematic, he suggests a previously unsuspected ironic intent. His analysis adds to our awareness of the potentialities inherent in the novel. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This book was originally published in 1997. The Bildungsroman - the story of the development or formation of a young man - is the most famous German contribution to the European novel. Most studies of the Bildungsroman have concentrated on its underlying philosophy; Michael Minden addresses it as literature. He offers detailed readings of some of the best-known novels in the German language, from Goethe to Mann, including Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Agathon, Anton Reiser, Hyperion, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Der grüne Heinrich, Der Nachsommer, and Der Zauberberg. Looking at the novels from the points of view of gender, subjectivity, and the ideology of the aesthetic, and taking account of the literary theory, Minden uncovers aspects and motifs which subvert traditional ideas of the Bildungsroman and raise questions about the function and status of literature.

Marc Redfield maintains that the literary genre of the Bildungsroman brings into sharp focus the contradictions of aesthetics, and also that aesthetics exemplifies what is called ideology. He combines a wide-ranging account of the history and theory of aesthetics with close readings of novels by Goethe, George Eliot, and Gustave Flaubert. For Redfield, these fictions of character formation demonstrate the paradoxical relation between aesthetics and literature: the notion of the Bildungsroman may be expanded to apply to any text that can be figured as a subject producing itself in history, which is to say any text whatsoever. At the same time, the category may be contracted to include only a handful of novels, (or even none at all), a paradox that has led critics to denigrate the Bildungsroman as a phantom genre.

The Bildungsroman has been one of the most significant genres in Western literature since the eighteenth century. This volume, comprised of eleven chapters by leading experts in the field, offers original insights into how the novel of formation developed a strong tradition in Germany, France, Britain, Russia, and the USA. In demonstrating how the genre has been adopted and adapted in innovative forms of fiction, this volume also shows how a genre traditionally associated with the young white man has been used to give expression to the formative experiences of women, LGBTQ people, and post-colonial populations. Exploring the genre's emergence and evolution in numerous countries and across more than two hundred years, this volume provides unprecedented historical and geographical coverage and demonstrates that the Bildungsroman has a rich heritage and a bright future.

This is the first study of Thomas Mann's landmark German modernist novel Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain, 1924) that takes as its starting point the interest in Mann's book shown by non-academic readers. It is also a case study in a cluster of issues central to the interrelated fields of transnational German studies, global modernism studies, comparative literature, and reception theory: it addresses the global circulation of German modernism, popular afterlives of a canonical work, access to cultural participation, relationship between so-called 'high-brow' and 'low-brow' culture, and the limitations of traditional academic reading practices. The study intervenes in these discussions by developing a critical practice termed 'closer reading' and positioning it within the framework of world literature studies. Mann's Magic Mountain centres around nine comparative readings of five novels, three films, and one short story conceived as responses to The Magic Mountain. These works provide access to distinct readings of Mann's text on three levels: they function as records of their authors' reading of Mann, provide insights into broader culturally and historically specific interpretations of the novel, and feature portrayals of fictional readers of The Magic Mountain. These nine case studies are contextualized, complemented, enhanced, and expanded through references to hundreds of other diverse sources that testify to a lively engagement with The Magic Mountain outside of academic scholarship, including journalistic reviews, discussions on internet fora and blogs, personal essays and memoirs, Mann's fan mail and his replies to it, publishing advertisements, and marketing brochures from Davos, where the novel is set.

Harry Shaw's aim is to promote a fuller understanding of nineteenth-century historical fiction by revealing its formal possibilities and limitations. His wide-ranging book establishes a typology of the ways in which history was used in prose fiction during the nineteenth century, examining major works by Sir Walter Scott--the first modern historical novelist--and by Balzac, Hugo, Anatole France, Eliot, Thackeray, Dickens, and Tolstoy.

The focus of this study is coming of age in troubled Cultural Revolutionary times as portrayed in contemporary Chinese Bildungsroman fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua, along with a comprehensive overview of the Bildungsroman in China and the west.

Follows the evolution of the Orient as a positive literary device in German literature and demonstrates how it was used to explore subjectivity and the possibility of wholeness. For centuries, Europe's eastward gaze has been wary if not hostile. Medieval man envisaged grotesque beings at the world's edge and scanned the steppes and straits on the immediate horizon for the Asian or Arab hordes that might swarm across them. Through the Crusades, the early modern era, and the age of imperialism, Europeans regarded the Eastern subject as requiring both "discovery" and conquest. Conveniently, the "Oriental" came to represent fanaticism, terrorism, moral laxity, and inscrutability, among other stereotypes. The list of German literary works that reinforced negative clichés about the East is long, but Orienting the Self argues for the presence in the Germanliterary tradition of a powerful perception of the East as the scene of desire, fantasy, and fulfillment. It follows the evolution of the Orient as a literary device and demonstrates how it was used to explore subjectivity and the possibility of wholeness. The five works treated in this study - Parzival, Fortunatus, Effi Briest, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and The Magic Mountain - are narratives of development in which the encounter with the East is central to the progression toward selfhood and the promise of fulfillment. Debra N. Prager is Associate Professor of German at Washington and Lee University.

The only English translation of a crucial interpretation of Nietzsche