Bildungsroman: Coming of Age Narratives
“Youth is, so to speak, modernity's ‘essence’, the sign of a world that seeks its meaning in the future rather than in the past”, says Franco Moretti as he dissects the genre of bildungsroman. Youth, he decidedly notes, is at the heart of the genre, owing to the mobility and interiority that it facilitates, and its characterisation as dynamic and unstable, yet transient and impermanent. Critics such as Barbra Whitman trace the genre as far back as Homer’s Iliad (8th century BCE) and evolving to include an array of narratives and characters, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1623) to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1795-95).