Overview

Metaphorically speaking, the nineteenth-century English Bildungsroman, dealing with the principle of identity formation, parallels Victorian fiction as a whole, revealing the completion of its own formation, which began in the eighteenth century. Significantly, the most important and popular Victorian novels are Bildungsromane, in which authors construct or rather reconstruct their own life experiences as formative processes. This book shows that the Bildungsroman has a development history, is a specific literary system, and consists of a thematic and narrative pattern. It details the entrance of this newly established fictional tradition into Victorian culture and literature through Carlyle's threefold literary reception of the novel of formation and its subsequent flourishing and complexity. In this respect, a number of novelistic works are scrutinized, and each faces the question as to whether its thematic and narrative perspectives fit the pattern and shape of the Bildungsroman.

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9781527538269

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Petru Golban holds a PhD in English and American Literature from Al. I. Cuza University of Iasi, Romania. He teaches literary theory and English literature-related classes at Namik Kemal University, Turkey. He is the author of eight books, including The Foundations of English Literary Criticism: From Philip Sidney to Henry James, Texts Analyzing Literature as Argument, and A History of the Bildungsroman: From Ancient Beginnings to Romanticism, and of some 50 literary studies. His research focuses on particular aspects of the history of English literature, comparative literary studies, and literary theory and criticism.

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