A History of the Bildungsroman : From Ancient Beginnings to Romanticism.

Intro -- Contents -- Foreword -- Preface -- Preliminaries -- Chapter One -- Chapter Two -- Chapter Three -- Chapter Four -- Chapter Five -- 5.1 Picaresque Heritage and Neoclassical Principles Shaping Verisimilitude -- 5.2 Verisimilitude in Its Literary Expression -- 5.2.1 Gulliver's Travels and Verisimilitude Absent -- 5.2.2 Robinson Crusoe and Verisimilitude Implied -- 5.2.3 Pamela and Verisimilitude Limited -- 5.2.4 Joseph Andrews and Verisimilitude Complexified -- 5.2.5 Tom Jones and Verisimilitude Panoramic -- 5.3 Comparative and Final Remarks -- 5.4 Other Fictional Voices -- 5.5 Neoclassicism Again, Now Also Shaping Literary Theory -- Chapter Six -- 6.1 Individuality and Romanticism -- 6.2 Individuality in Focus -- 6.3 Nature, Pantheism, and the Growing Poetic Mind -- 6.3.1 Tintern Abbey -- 6.3.2 Ode to the West Wind and To a Skylark -- 6.3.3 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner -- 6.3.4 Nature as a Mode of Existence -- 6.4 The Concern with the Experience of Childhood -- 6.4.1 Voices of Innocence and Experience in William Blake's Poetry -- 6.4.2 The Child and the Concern with Individual Formation in the Poetry of William Wordsworth -- 6.4.3 Other Poets, and in Particular John Keats's Insights of Infantile Experience in Letters and Poetic Practice -- 6.5 English Romantic Movement and Its Social Concern -- 6.5.1 Hypostases of the Byronic Hero, and the Byronic Hero in Development -- 6.5.2 History and Identity Development -- Chapter Seven -- 7.1 Elements of the Pattern in French and German Fiction -- 7.2 Bakhtin on Goethe -- 7.3 The Theme of Formation as a Literary Concern in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre -- Concluding Reflections -- Bibliography -- Index.

This book establishes a vector of methodology in the approach to a particular type of fictional discourse, namely the English Bildungsroman (the novel of identity formation). Its wide-ranging critical perspectives are also useful to anyone concerned with, first of all, European and English novelistic genres, but also to those interested in theoretical perspectives of modern fiction studies in general, as well as in certain aspects of Western literature as a developing tradition.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.