HENRY JAMES AND THE BILDUNGSROMAN: BETWEEN CONVENTION AND ITS ALTERATION
HENRY JAMES AND THE BILDUNGSROMAN: BETWEEN CONVENTION AND ITS ALTERATION

Summary/Abstract: Some of the most important and popular Victorian novels are Bildungsromane, in which authors construct or rather reconstruct their own life experiences as formative processes. To mention just David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, The Mill on the Floss, Marius the Epicurean, and so on. Following its long development history from ancient narratives to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, the Bildungsroman enters as a newly established fictional tradition into Victorian culture and literature through Carlyle’s threefold literary reception of the novel of formation and displays its subsequent flourishing and complexity as a literary system encompassing particular thematic and narrative patterns. In this study, a number of novelistic works by Henry James 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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