Academic literature on the topic 'English Bildungsromans'

Masande Ntshanga’s novel The Reactive (2014) is the first South African novel written by a black male writer to feature the first-personvoice of an HIV-positive man, Lindanathi. Following Kgebetli Moele’s The Book of the Dead (2009), which gave the virus itself a voice, The Reactive heralds a significant shift in the portrayal of HIV in South African literature. Eben Venter’s Afrikaans novel Ek Stamel, EkSterwe (1996) which was translated into English by Luke Stubbs as My Beautiful Death (2004), and which has – significantly – received little critical review in English as an HIV narrative, tells the story of a white South African man, Konstant, in the Australian diaspora whoeventually succumbs to AIDS. Both novels complicate ideas of masculinity and can be described as ‘coming of age’ narratives or bildungsromans. Both novels sit historically on the cusp of change, before and after the widespread availability of ARVs. Given theircommonality of subject and narrative perspective, these texts seem ripe for comparison despite their authors’ different backgrounds. The shifts and continuities in the representation of HIV/AIDS found between these two novels, published 18 years apart, seem to disrupt the trajectory of the post-colonial bildungsroman as it is mediated (for the first time?) through the HIVpositive narrator. Reading these two novels together helps us to understand literary patterns, associations and dissociations, which reveal a cultural symbology of HIV/AIDS, part of a wider cultural symbology of illness in South African literature.

In this article, we seek to articulate a genre theory-centered definition of girls’ literature, and interrogate its subgenre, the girl’s bildungsroman, as contextual, cultural sites of rhetoric regarding girls and girlhood. By exploring English-language North American girls’ literature, we identify it within a framework of genre as social action, tracing the protagonists’ maturation into the socially determined roles of wife and mother. We explore the ways in which the girl’s bildungsroman follows a home-away-home model, but with the end result of socially acceptable community integration, rather than the boy’s bildungsroman’s culmination in heroic independent identity via quests and adventures.

Franco Moretti argues that inherent in the Bildungsroman is a tension between youth as an energetic emblem of modernity and change, and adulthood, which signifies stoppage, stasis, and finality. However, Wordsworth’s Prelude complicates this binary, as the Romantic resistance to the adult order renders childhood and youth a dialectical image of rebellion, stasis, and finality. The Prelude has been read as a formation narrative that influenced the English Bildungsroman, yet Wordsworth’s representation of childhood within a frozen temporality indicates how the Prelude’s telos of progress and growth becomes a conflicted matter. The dialectic of growth that informs the work subverts the linearity of the story of development and at the same time produces anxiety about the difficulty to grow up. The topos of the child who does not grow up captures the inherent ambiguity surrounding the Bildung ideal, while the morbidity associated with this topos reveals the dark side of the idealization of childhood.

In this article, I examine how Dominican American author Angie Cruz’s novel Dominicana (2019) uses the bildungsroman genre to point to cross-cultural solidarity, or different communities working in tandem, to contest hegemonic discourse. Cruz’s take on a bildungsroman has an interesting inflection that juxtaposes learning and unlearning in two different societies (Dominican and American) where lessons do not inform each other. Because Cruz's main protagonist Ana’s sense of Self develops alongside her civic engagement, I argue that it is useful to think of Dominicana as a feminist bildungsroman. Along with her brother-in-law César, Ana searches for change through relationality and intercultural empathy as vehicles toward larger community engagement that shares a common plight. Due to her peripheral positionality as an undocumented, non-English-speaking Person of Color in 1960s New York, she finds a location of identity within an alternative community of African American and white protestors, whose intersection is of class and political beliefs. My goal is not to overlook or minimize differences between groups, differences that have, at times, been contentious, but rather to emphasize that Cruz’s sense of belonging is guided by increased engagement in alternative communities that share in her alienation. Utilizing a theoretical lens grounded in the works of Jill Toliver Richardson, Rita Felski, and Amy Cummins and Myra Infante-Sheridan, I conclude that for Cruz, intercultural empathy and alternative communities are viable paths toward resisting the American national community that presents itself as an unattainable model of assimilation.

AbstractThis article discusses how an increased focus on intertextuality may contribute to the development of reading skills among ESL/EFL student teachers. When we read literary texts, there is often an element of recognition and intertextuality involved. By working with what the students already know, we may facilitate the development of their aptitude for reading. The rationale for approaching literature in this way is to suggest answers to the underlying question: How can we work with literature in the classroom to make it worthwhile and stimulating for more students to read literary texts? A group of teacher training students of English and their teacher studied excerpts from an example novel, When Jays Fly to Bárbmo, and its intertexts. The data were collected through a single-case study of a teacher/researcher’s observation log and field notes of the teaching scheme and group discussions in class. The students saw how narrative formulas are repeated. For instance, the students identified the Bildungsroman – portraying a young character’s identity quest – as an important genre of children and young adults’ literature. The article argues that the identification of intertextual references will help them and serve as scaffolding in the reading process. An enhanced knowledge of such intertextual traits may facilitate the development of metacognitive strategies for reading. A raised awareness among the students about the phenomenon of intertextuality is important when developing strategies for reading narrative literary texts.Keywords: ESL/EFL in Teacher Training, reading novels, intertextuality, metacognition, When Jays Fly to BárbmoEn intertekstuell tilnærming til lærerstudenters lesing av engelskspråklig skjønnlitteraturSammendragDenne artikkelen diskuterer hvordan et større fokus på intertekstualitet kan bidra til utviklingen av leseferdigheter hos engelskstudentene i lærerutdanningen. Når vi leser litterære tekster, innebærer det ofte et element av gjenkjennelse og intertekstualitet. Ved å arbeide med det studentene allerede kjenner til, kan vi legge til rette for utvikling av deres leseferdigheter. Begrunnelsen for denne tilnærmingen til litteraturundervisningen er å søke svar på det underliggende spørsmålet: Hvordan arbeide med skjønnlitterære tekster i klasserommet slik at flere engelskstudenter oppfatter lesing som verdifullt og stimulerende. En engelskklasse i lærerutdanningen og læreren deres leste utdrag av en eksempelroman, When Jays Fly to Bárbmo, med vekt på intertekstuelle referanser. Datagrunnlaget for studien består av en enkel casestudie av lærerens/forskerens observasjonslogg, feltnotater fra selve undervisningsøkten og gruppediskusjonene som læreren/forskeren og studentene hadde. Studentene oppdaget hvordan narrative formler gjentas. De identifiserte Bildungsromanen, som omhandler en ung hovedpersons søken etter identitet, som en sentral sjanger i barne- og ungdomslitteraturen. Artikkelen argumenterer for at identifiseringen av intertekstuelle referanser vil hjelpe dem og tjene som stillas i leseprosessen. Mer kunnskap om intertekstuelle trekk ved tekster kan støtte utviklingen av metakognitive lesestrategier. En større bevissthet blant studenten om fenomenet intertekstualitet er viktig når man utvikler strategier for å lese narrative skjønnlitterære tekster.Nøkkelord: Faget engelsk i lærerutdanning, lesing av romaner, intertekstualitet, metakognisjon, When Jays Fly to Bárbmo

In October 1914, the English writer and publisher Douglas Goldring was invalided out of the British Army. By 1916, he had become a conscientious objector and moved to Ireland, where he lived for the next two years, witnessing the aftermath of the Easter Rising. Illuminating connections between the pacifist movement in Britain and Irish Republicanism, his writings of this period – including two Irish travelogues and a propagandist semi-autobiographical bildungsroman, The Fortune (1917) – disclose transnational and transcultural networks of resistance and dissidence, and show how the Rising and its aftermath helped to radicalise pacifist writers in London.

Abstract This paper examines narrative representations of authors and authorship in English-language fiction from the 1890s to the 1920s. From Henry James onwards, such narratives revise the basic, and by that time exhausted, plot elements of the novel of literary apprenticeship as featured in Dickens’s David Copperfield and Thackeray’s Pendennis, among many others. Instead of focusing on ideas of development and professional formation, they depict authors subdued by a sense of shrinking opportunities and lack of movement. Aging or dying authors in James and Mann, young but soon disappointed authors in Joyce, Forster, or Green: wherever we look, we find an ambivalence of promise that often ends in stagnation, failure, even death. In this context, my paper presents a close reading of three less frequently discussed modernist variations on the literary bildungsroman: Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams (1897/1907), E.M. Forster’s The Longest Journey (1907), and Henry Green’s Blindness (1926).

Šio straipsnio tikslas yra pristatyti naują naratyvinį žanrą – grafinį romaną (angl. graphic novel), kilusį iš komiksų tradicijų. Komiksų vieta Šiaurės Ameri­kos kultūroje paradoksali; nors jie nuo XX a. pra­džios spausdinami beveik visuose JAV ir Kanados laikraščiuose, nevertinami nei kaip menas, nei kaip literatūra. Tik paskutiniame XX a. dešimtmetyje li­teratūrologai atkreipė dėmesį į komiksus, kaip savitą naratyvinį žanrą: aiškinama, kad būtina analizuoti žodžių ir vaizdų sąryšį, kuris sukuria išskirtinę nara­tyvinę kalbą. Šią kalbą meistriškai naudoja grafinių romanų kūrėjai – pritaiko ją visai naujoms temoms. Pavyzdžiui, amerikiečio Arto Spiegelmano romanas Maus („Pelė“, išvertus iš vokiečių kalbos) pasako­ja apie žydų holokausto siaubą. Iš pirmo žvilgsnio atrodo beveik šventvagiška, kad autorius apie žydų kančias Aušvico lageryje pasakoja naudodamasis ži­noma komiksų „kalbančių gyvulių“ tradicija. Tačiau A. Spiegelmanas sugeba tragiškus įvykius perteikti ironišku komiksų stiliumi. Jo romane išryškinama antrosios kartos paveldėta kančia, kuri komplikuo­ja tėvo ir sūnaus santykius. 1992 m. romanas Mauspelnė autoriui prestižinę Amerikos „Pulitzer“ lite­ratūros premiją. Kitas amerikiečių grafinio romano kūrėjas Joe Sacco taip pat domisi istorinių katastrofų poveikiu paprastų žmonių gyvenimui. RomanasPa­lestinas vaizduoja autoriaus klaidžiojimą per palesti­niečių pabėgėlių gyvenvietes. Romano įtampa kyla iš autoriaus bendravimo su palestiniečiais – ironijos objektu dažniausiai tampa jis pats, naivus svečias iš turtingų Vakarų. Žinomiausi Kanados grafinio roma­no kūrėjai Chesteris Brownas ir Seth (rašytojo Gre­gory Gallanto slapyvardis) taip pat linkę naudoti au­tobiografinę medžiagą. C. Brownas romane Tu man niekad nepatikai (išleistas 2002 m.) galima įžvelgti bildungsromano bruožų. Pagrindinis herojus, kaip ir autorius, vardu Chesteris, augantis Monrealio prie­miestyje, turi tipiškų paauglystės rūpesčių. Tik vai­kino motinai staiga susirgus nervų liga, susidrumsčia ramus priemiesčio gyvenimas. Chesteris priverstas subręsti. Seth’o romane Geras gyvenimas, jei tik nepalūžti (išleistas 2003 m.) irgi autobiografinis; pa­grindinis herojus, kaip ir autorius, vardu Seth’as. Ro­mano veiksmas – Seth’o pastangos surasti žinių apie vieną jau seniai užmirštą Kanados karikatūrininką, su kuriuo Seth’as tapatinasi. Autorius nenori prisitai­kyti prie Šiaurės Amerikos polinkio greitai užmirš­ti praeitį, nevertinti jos kultūros. Grafinis romanas apskritai yra iššūkis literatūrologams, verčiantis juos ieškoti naujų teorijų ir metodologijų, pagal kurias būtų galima nagrinėti naują žanrą.

Thesis (MA (English))--University of Stellenbosch, 2009.
ENGLISH ABTRACT: In recent years, original and exciting developments have been taking place in Nigerian literature. This new body of literature, collectively referred to as the ―third generation‖, has lately received international acclaim. In this emergent literature, the negotiation of a new, contemporary identity has become a central focus. At the same time, recent Nigerian literary texts are articulating responses to various developments in the Nigerian nation: Nigeria‘s current political and socio-economic situation, diverse forms of cultural hybridisation, as well as an increasing trans-national consciousness, to mention only a few. Three 21st-century novels – Chimamanda Nogzi Adichie‘s Purple Hibiscus (2004), Sefi Atta‘s Everything Good Will Come (2004) and Chris Abani‘s GraceLand (2005) – reveal how new avenues of identity-negotiation and formation are being explored in various contemporary Nigerian situations. This study tracks the ways in which the Bildungsroman, the novel of self-development, serves as a vehicle through which this new identity is articulated. Concurrently, this study also grapples with the ways in which the articulation and negotiation of this new identity reshapes the conventions of the classical Bildungsroman genre, thereby establishing a unique and contemporary Nigerian Bildungsroman for the 21st century. The identity that is being negotiated by the third generation is multi-layered and inclusive, as opposed to the exclusive and unitary identities which are observable in Nigerian novels of the previous two generations. Such inclusivity, as well as the hybrid environments in which this identity is being negotiated, results in a form of ―identity layering‖. Thus, the individual comes into being at the point of intersection, overlap and collision of various modes of self-making. Such ―layering‖ allows the individual, albeit not without challenge, to perform a self-styled identity, which does not necessarily conform to the dictates of society. At the same time, the identity is negotiated by means of an engagement, in the form of intertextual dialoguing, with Nigeria‘s preceding literary generations. The most prominent arenas in which this new identity is negotiated include silenced domestic spaces, religo-cultural traditions, constructs of gender and nation, as well as in multicultural and hybrid communities. The investigation conducted in this thesis will, consequently, also focus on such areas of Nigerian life, as they are portrayed in the focal texts. Various theories of literary analysis (some of which specifically focus on Nigeria), Bildungsroman theory, theories of allegory, (imaginative) nation formation, feminism, gender and performativity, as well as theories of cultural identity and cultural exchanges, will form the critical and theoretical framework within which this investigation will be executed. Chapter One explores how Purple Hibiscus‘s protagonist, Kambili Achike, negotiates her gender identity and voice in order to constitute herself as an independent, self-authoring individual. Chapter Two, which focuses on Everything Good Will Come, investigates the dialectic relationship between Enitan Taiwo‘s national and personal identity, which inevitably leads to her quest to reconceive her gender identity, since national identity, as she finds out, is always an engendered construct. In its analysis of GraceLand, Chapter Three turns to the difficulties that Elvis Oke faces when he attempts to negotiate an alternative masculine identity within a rigid patriarchal system and between the cracks of a fraudulent African modernity.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: In die afgelope paar jaar was daar opwindende, oorspronklike ontwikkelinge in Nigeriese literatuur. Hierdie nuwe literatuurkorpus, wat gesamentlik bekend staan as die ―derde generasie, het onlangs internasionale erkenning ontvang. In hierdie opkomende literatuur, kry die soeke na 'n nuwe, kontemporêre identiteit ‘n sentrale fokus. Terselfdertyd reageer onlangse Nigeriese literêre werke met verskeie ontwikkelinge in die Negeriese nasie: Nigerië se huidige politieke en sosio-ekonomiese situasie, diverse vorme van kultuurverbastering asook 'n toenemende trans-nasionale bewustheid, om maar ‘n paar te noem. Drie 21ste eeuse romans – Chimamanda Nogzi Adichie se Purple Hibiscus (2004), Sefi Atta se Everything Good Will Come (2004) en Chris Abani se GraceLand (2005) – onthul hoe nuwe kanale van identiteidsonderhandeling en –vorming in verskeie kontemporêre Nigeriese situasies ondersoek word. Hierdie studie ondersoek die maniere waarop die Bildungsroman, die roman van selfontwikkeling, as ‗n medium dien waardeur hierdie nuwe identiteit geartikuleer word. Terselfdertyd sal hierdie studie ook worstel met die maniere waarin die artikulasie en soeke na hierdie nuwe identiteit die konvensies van die klassieke Bildungsroman genre hervorm, en daardeur 'n unieke en kontemporêre Nigeriese Bildungsroman vir die 21ste eeu vestig. Die identiteit wat ontwikkel deur die derde generasie is veelvlakkig en inklusief en staan teenoor die eksklusiewe, eenvormige identiteite wat in Nigeriese romans van die vorige twee generasies opgemerk word. Hierdie inklusiwiteit, sowel as die hibriede omgewings waarin hierdie identeite ontwikkel word, lei tot die vorming van identiteitslae. Die individu kom dus tot stand by die kruising, oorvleueling en botsing van verskillende metodes van selfvorming. Hierdie vorming van lae laat die individu toe, alhoewel nie sonder uitdagings nie, om 'n selfgevormde identiteit te hê wat nie noodwndig aan die eise van die gemeenskap voldoen nie. Terselfdertyd word hierdie identiteit onderhandel deur ‗n skakeling met Nigerië se voorafgaande literêre generasies in die vorm van intertekstuele dialoog. Die mees prominente omgewings waar hierdie nuwe identiteit onderhandel word, sluit stilgemaakte huishoudelike spasies, religieus-kulturele tradisies, konstrukte van gender en nasie, sowel as multi-kulturele en hibriede gemeenskappe in. Die ondersoek wat in hierdie tesis uitgevoer sal word, sal daarom ook fokus op hierdie areas van Nigeriese lewe, soos deur die fokale tekste voorgestel. Verskeie teorieë van literêre analise (sommige wat spesifiek op Nigerië fokus), Bildungsromanteorie, teorieë van allegorie, (denkbeeldige) nasievorming, feminisme, gender en performatiwiteit, sowel as teorieë van kultuuridentiteit en -uitruiling, vorm die kritiese en teoretiese raamwerk waarbinne hierdie ondersoek uitgevoer sal word. Hoofstuk een ondersoek hoe Purple Hibiscus se protagonist, Kambili Achike, haar genderidentiteit onderhandel en uitdrukking gee om haarself as onafhanklike, self-skeppende individu te vorm. Hoofstuk twee, wat fokus op Everything Good Will Come, ondersoek die dialektiese verhouding tussen Enitan Taiwo se nasionale en persoonlike identiteit, wat onvermydelik lei tot die herbedenking van haar genderidentiteit, aangesien nasionale identiteit, soos sy uitvind, altyd 'n gekweekte konstruk is. In sy analise van GraceLand, draai Hoofstuk drie om die moeilikhede wat Elvis Oke in die gesig staar wanneer hy probeer om ‘n alternatiewe manlike identiteit te onderhandel in 'n rigiede patriargale sisteem tussen krake van 'n bedrieglike Afrika-moderniteit.

My thesis examines the ways in which the critical structure of modern Irish Bildungsroman deconstructs and re-examines ‘residues of past trauma’ in the form of socio-cultural, psychological, personal and notably political artefacts present in the nation’s unfortunate engagement with the State’s politics of formation. The result is a resistant and radical form which challenges the classical and modern specificity of the genre by introducing a non-conformist, post-Joycean protagonist, whose antithetical perception of history and socio-cultural norms contradicts the conservative efforts of the post-independence Irish State. To examine such a resistant critical structure, this thesis focuses on Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry (1999), Dermot Bolger’s The Woman’s Daughter (1987), William Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault (2002), Seamus Deane’s Reading In The Dark (1996), Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy (1992), Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996), Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls (1960) and A Pagan Place (1970), Nuala O’Faolain’s Are You Somebody? (1996), Francis Stuart’s Black List, Section H (1971), Flann O’Brien’s The Hard Life (1961), and John McGahern’s The Dark (1965). The selected novels provide an invaluable insight into the nation’s perception of sensitive concepts such as modernism and modern Irish identity, and how the confluence of these two produced a critical dialectical discourse which chronicles the formation of a non-conformist, ahistorical modern protagonist. To achieve a historical relevance, this thesis starts by examining Doyle’s fictionalization of 1916 Easter Rising and the chaotic 1920s; Bolger’s exploration of a repressive, inward-looking post-independence Irish society in the 1930s and the 1940s; Trevor’s engagement with a socio-political divide that further split the nation; Deane’s autogenous reading of an internal neocolonial ‘Othering’ during the ‘emergency’; McCabe’s illustration of the State’s architecture of oppression, and societal introversion from the early 1940s to the 1960s; Edna O’Brien’s and Nuala O’Faolain’s exemplary illustration of women’s blighted sexual Bildung in the 1940s, 50s and 60s; and finally examining a radical, ‘chronocentric’ depiction of a socio-political divide fictionalized by Stuart and McGahern, which emerged during the early days of the State and continued to dominate the nation well into the 1960s and the early 1970s. By examining psycho-social, sexual and political traumata reflected in the modern Irish Bildungsroman, this thesis provides a dialectical reading of the gap that appeared between the revolutionary ethos of independent Irish identity formation, rooted in the principles of 1916 Rising and the 1920s, and that which appeared in the form of a tolerant republicanism in the 1980s. To study this socio-historical gap, I examine the nation’s criticism of the State’s politics and structure of formation, manifested in narratives of individual and national formation. The modern Irish Bildungsroman, I argue, appropriates the traditional features of the genre, for instance, chronicling the individual’s psychosocial formation and the potential to re-engage with their society, and produces a critical matrix for a dialectical discourse which enables the nation to voice their concerns vis-à-vis a politically dichotomous post-independence Irish society, a repressed history, and at the same time to externalize their perception of modern Irish formation, being founded on an anti-colonial, non-conservative and politically aware consciousness. The result, which I call the ‘Meta-National Narrative of Formation,’ is a historically resistant and socio-politically conscious narrative which finds independence in rejection, imposition, and deformation, namely, by defying the State’s architecture of formation as well as their nativist, retrograde visions of Irish identity.

In this dissertation I intervene in and challenge already-existing critical studies of Virginia Woolf's The Waves (1931) that focus on ideas of imperialism, empire and subject-making practices in the novel by arguing for a revisionist reading of The Waves as a Bildungsroman. Unlike the Bildungsroman of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, which utilised standard novelistic conventions to explore the relation between form and reality, I contend that The Waves is a thoroughly modernist reinvention of the Bildungsroman form designed to capture a rapidly industrialising and modernising English society. To capture the socio-political unrest in twentieth-century England at this time, Woolf deviates from the convention of a single-protagonist narration, using multiple perspectives to expose the contradictions in processes of self-formation, especially with regard to the relation between the self, nation and national identity. The correspondence between self, nation and national identity is explored through the silent seventh character, Percival, who I argue is characterised as a hero in the medieval romance tradition to expose the romantic and heroic fictional narratives that provided the framework for ideas of empire and imperialism, then at the core of nationhood and national identity in England. Conversely I argue that the character who narrates a third of the novel's narrative, Bernard, provides us with an alternative to empire and imperialism in subject-making practices. I argue that in the final section of The Waves Bernard deviates from the direct-speech narrative of preceding sections of the novel and engages the reader directly. The reader is thus alerted not only to his or her role as a reader, but also to Bernard's overarching role as primary protagonist in the novel. The reader has progressed alongside Bernard through the narrative in keeping with the genre designation of the Bildungsroman which encourages the progression of the reader alongside the progression of the primary protagonist. The reader is further encouraged in his or her progression by an aesthetic education present in the music and poetry that Woolf incorporates not only in the content, but in the very structure of the text. Two of the novel's characters, Louis and Neville, use poetry to locate their subjectivities within larger historical narratives, while Beethoven's String Quartet No. 13 in B♭ major, Opus 130, informs the structure of the text, contributing to the interactive sonic and non-sonic landscape that actively invites the participation of the reader. The reader's participation in the novel is most fully realised when Bernard addresses the reader directly in the final section of The Waves. This interaction explains and thus concretises Woolf's overarching critiques of empire and imperialism in the novel alongside her proposed methods - which directly oppose the ideology of imperialism - for developing a subjectivity formed in relation to the common, and the individual experience of the common as a historically and materially determined phenomenon. The common in this sense is a community of 'common reading subjects', who like Woolf are not formally educated, but develop a subjectivity through reading premised on an equality of intelligence which enables them to engage critically with, order and make sense of the society and politics of their surrounding world. In this way, I show that Woolf challenges the already existing subject-making practices in twentieth-century England by exposing the contradictions - the exclusion of the marginalised, the poor and women - in ideas of Englishness. She proposes an alternative form of subject-making that is as diverse as her reading public and premised on a non-exclusionary acknowledgement of an equality of intelligence that defies class, gender and social boundaries.

This thesis explores the relevance of the Bildungsroman genre to a selection of Northern Irish writing from the 1960s through to the late 1990s. Synthesizing a range of critical approaches it shows how six novels by Leitch, Duffaud, Patterson, Deane, Madden and Molloy challenge the traditional Bildungsroman. It brings the thwarted Bildungsroman into correspondence with the key elements of ‘minority discourse’ as defined by Mohamed and Lloyd (1990), focusing on subjectivity and identity position. Using Jameson’s concept of the ‘political unconscious’ the thesis demonstrates how fragmented and hybridised subjectivities challenge the two main Northern Irish identarian discourses, Irish nationalism and Ulster unionism. It argues that all six counter-Bildungsromane feature some of the characteristics of ‘minority discourse’ with one even providing an example of ‘minor writing’ as defined by Deleuze and Guattari (1975).

This thesis has two aims. The first one is to elucidate how Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) functions as a Bildungsroman, and the other one is to demonstrate how the novel also has a coming of age aspect based on feminism. Whilst Alice matures in the traditional sense, she also in parallel does so as a stronger female fighting for gender rights with signs of feminism. The feminist angle as well as the surreal world of Wonderland makes the novel a not very obvious Bildungsroman in a genre dominated by male protagonists. For Alice to be a young female child who ends up in a fantasy world thus makes her a very fascinating character. The central hypothesis of this thesis is that what Alice is exposed to and reacts to in Wonderland generally reflects the genre of a Bildungsroman and also specifically a feminist Bildungsroman. Theoretical framework is based on the ideas of Franco Moretti, Mikhail Bakhtin, Thomas Jeffers, Carol Lazzaro-Weis, George Eliot and Elizabeth Drew Stoddard, as well as novels by Eliot and Stoddard. This includes dynamic protagonists, unpredictable development, symbols of modernity, the quest for universality, and minor characters who make sure that the protagonist develops, as well as feminist struggle by means of disregarding the ‘cult of true womanhood’ in a genre and society dominated by men.

This chapter explores Beckett’s polyphonic, multilingual intertextuality. It begins by examining the role of Dante’s Divina Commedia in the composition of Comment c’est and challenging the received idea that Dante’s work is the ur-text underwriting Beckett’s novel. It charts when Dantean images enter the work’s genesis and how they are volatilized when rendered in the French of Comment c’est and the English of How It Is. Beckett is shown to inscribe into his Dantean images and echoes, allusions to other texts in the French and English traditions. A new theory of Beckett’s multilingual authorship is offered, which draws on his use of Gœthe, the Bildungsroman and his acute attention to dynamics of pedagogical transfer and paideia.

Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, George Moore’s realist experiments both consolidated a realist movement in England and actively challenged institutions like circulating libraries that shaped the development of mid-century realism. But despite Moore’s importance to the institutionalisation of realism in England and the flourishing of naturalism in Ireland, he remains woefully understudied in part because of his performative, often comic, refusal of institutions. This chapter takes this performance seriously as it focuses on his revisions to the realist Bildungsroman in the ‘English’ Esther Waters (1894) and the ‘Irish’ A Drama in Muslin (1886). In both of these novels of development, Moore claims that public institutions and private growth are at odds. A Drama in Muslin adopts an explicitly anachronistic narrative temporality that refuses to allow the protagonist’s individual development to represent national development while Esther Waters validates the protagonist’s stasis over time – her illiteracy despite education. Combining an anti-institutional impulse with an anachronistic narrative temporality, Moore questions the institutionalised assumptions of what constitutes proper growth.

In Chapter Six, I maintain my focus on the Bildungsroman, examining novels in English and French, by novelists who left Libya at a young age, but have continued returning to it in their fiction. Through Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men (2006) and Kamal Ben Hameda’s La compagnie des Tripolitaines (2011; Under the Tripoli Sky, 2014), I explore evocations of childhood threatened by experiences of violence and vulnerability. Indicating both authors’ affinities with the novels discussed in Chapter Five, I identify how the novels dramatise the impossibility of growing-up in the ‘country of men’. In La compagnie des Tripolitaines, I explore this through the notion of oral ‘fly tales’ (histoires de mouche), told to the young protagonist-narrator by his aunt, and reframing human history through the paradigmatic ‘other’, which has flourished on its decay. In the Country of Men compounds the difficulty of telling stories about Libya’s past with the precarity of speaking in the present, as the protagonist-narrator confronts the oppressive realities of 1979 Tripoli, and attempts to formulate it into narratives that makes sense, many of which draw on images from the nonhuman world.

In Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness (2004; Giller Prize finalist; winner of Canada's Governor General's Award) Nomi Nickel, a sixteen-year-old Mennonite girl from southern Manitoba, Canada, tells the story of her short life before her excommunication from the closed community of the fictional East Village. East Village is based on a real town in southern Manitoba called Steinbach (where Toews was born), where Mennonite culture remains segregated from the rest of the world to protect its distinctive Anabaptist Protestantism and to keep its language, Mennonite Low German or Plattdeutsch, a living language, one which is both linguistically demotic yet ethnically hieratic because of its role in Mennonite faith. Since the Reformation, and more precisely the work of Menno Simons after whom this ethno-religious group was christened, Mennonites have used their particular brand of Low German to separate themselves from the rest of humankind. Toews constructs her novel as a multilingual narrative, to represent the cultural and religious tensions within. Set in the early 1980s, A Complicated Kindness details the events that lead up to Nomi’s excommunication, or shunning; Nomi’s exclusion is partly due to her embracing of the “English” culture through popular, mostly 1970s, music and books such as J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Insofar as Toews’s novel presents the conflict between the teenaged narrator and the patriarchal, conservative Mennonite culture, the books stands at the crossroads of negative and positive freedom. Put succinctly, since the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation, Mennonites have sought negative freedom, or freedom from persecution, yet its own tenets foreclose on the positive freedom of its individual members. This problem reaches its most intense expression in contemporary Mennonitism, both in Canada and in the EU, for Mennonite culture returns constantly to its founding precepts, even through the passage of time, coupled with diasporic history. Toews presents this conflict between this early modern religious subculture and postmodern liberal democracy through the eyes of a sarcastic, satirical Nomi, who, in this Bildungsroman, must solve the dialectic of her very identity: literally, the negative freedom of No Me or positive freedom of Know Me. As Mennonite writing in Canada is a relatively new phenomenon, about 50 years old, the question for those who call themselves Mennonite writers arises in terms of deciding between new, migrant, separate-group writing and writing as English-speaking Canadians.

The Franco-Chinese migrant writer François Cheng (Grand Prix de la francophonie de l’Académie française 2001) is the first French Academician of Asian origin. His French- language novel Le Dit de Tianyi (Prix Femina 1998, rather differently translated into English as The River Below) recounts the protagonist’s life trajectory across the turbulent twentieth century, from wartime China to France and back to a radically changed Communist China. The protagonist’s cross-cultural and often painful migrant experience largely mirrors that of the author, yet with the final part of the novel being completely fictional. The novel’s generic and stylistic hybridity demonstrates the author’s strenuous effort to investigate the literary possibilities of comparatively incorporating both Western and Eastern cultural heritages in the creative process. Although Le Dit is not formally categorized as a travelogue, travel motifs permeate the novel. The tripartite structure – ‘epic of departure’, ‘detouring journey’, ‘myth of return’ – is redolent of established models of travel since Odyssey. The characterization of the protagonist as a ‘wandering soul’ (âme errante) going on artistic pilgrimages as well as arduous quests for knowledge both in China and to the West, further complemented by the constant longing and attempt to be reunited with loved ones, is among the key features of travel writing largely shared by both Western and Chinese traditions. These travel motifs interact dynamically with the fundamental conception of the novel as both a Bildungsroman and Künstlerroman that linguistically translates, epistemically transforms, and spiritually transcends the individual’s experience of migrance (migration and errance). Such an interaction, then, inspires informed imagination and provokes lateral thinking about cultural representations, and entails a transcultural aesthetic that simultaneously revisits two great cultural heritages, engendering something ‘new’, or indeed, ‘old’. Drawing on theories of cultural translation (initiated notably by Homi Bhabha) and transculturality (Graham Huggan; Wolfgang Welsch), this article examines how the wide range of travel motifs function as a consistent structural and thematic frame and bring frictional qualities and effects to Cheng’s translingual novel. And I argue that these travel motifs ultimately create a liminal space where both European and Chinese literary and artistic traditions are set in motion towards a planetarian possibility of cultural ‘transcendence’ (Cheng’s own word).