Explore the vast range of titles available.

R.C. Bakhuizen van den Brink’s travel letters, written during his ‘exile’, 1844-1851 In the years 1844-1851, during his journey along libraries and archives in Germany and Austria, the young scholar and later writer and archivist Bakhuizen van den Brink (1810-1865) wrote extensive love letters to Julie Simon, who he had left behind in Liège. Expressing the emotions aroused by his exile from the Netherlands and the separation from the young woman whose heart he desired to win, Bakhuizen resorted to themes that are recurrent in other literary genres such as the epic and the Bildungsroman. Understanding the letters as works of art, this article sets out to trace and analyze these intertextual references between the letters and the genres of the epic and the Bildungsroman. References to the latter come to light when comparing the love letters to the letters Bakhuizen van den Brink wrote to his learned Dutch friends. By disclosing this intertextual network and by relating the themes from the epic and Bildungsroman to the repertoire of the young, 19th-century Dutch scholar, this article holds an attempt to deconstruct these 19th-century love letters.

Reimagining the coming-of-age literary tradition in the U.S. and U.K. within dynamic theological contexts Scholars have traditionally relied upon the assumption that the nineteenth-century bildungsroman in the Goethean tradition is an intrinsically secular genre exclusive to Europe, incompatible with the literature of a democratically based culture. By combining intellectual history with genre criticism, Principle and Propensity provides a critical reassessment of the bildungsroman, beginning with its largely overlooked theological premises: bildung as formation of the self in the image of God. Kelsey L. Bennett examines the dynamic differences, tensions, and possibilities that arise as interest in spiritual growth, or self-formation, collides with the democratic and quasi-democratic culture in the nineteenth-century British and American bildungsroman. Beginning with the idea that interest in an individual's moral and psychological growth, or bildung, originated as a religious exercise in the context of Protestant theological traditions, Bennett shows how these traditions found ways into the bildungsroman, the literary genre most closely concerned with the relationship between individual experience and self-formation. Part 1 of Principle and Propensity examines the attributes of parallel national traditions of spiritual self-formation as they convened under the auspices of the international revival movements: the Evangelical Revival, the Great Awakening, and the renewal of Pietism in Germany, led respectively by John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, and Count Nikolaus Ludwig Zinzendorf. Further it reveals the ways in which spiritual self-formation and the international revival movements coalesce in the bildungsroman prototype, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship). Part 2 in turn explores the ways these traditions manifest themselves in the nineteenth-century bildungsroman in England and the United States through Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, Pierre, and Portrait of a Lady. Though Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre was a library staple for most serious writers in nineteenth-century England and in the United States, Bennett shows how writers such as Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, and Henry James also drew on their own religious traditions of self-formation, adding richness and distinction to the received genre.

This thesis explores the concept of a reworked Bildungsroman in modernist texts that have not previously been studied together. This project maintains that The Voyage Out (1915), Women in Love (1920), and Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941) expand traditional Bildungsroman and Grand Touristic narratives by representing gender limitations within the literary frameworks. I demonstrate how the texts represent non-conservative paths of development for women by using travel as a mechanism for exploring the impossibility of integration and equality between the sexes, as well as well as a means for demonstrating how women are constructed, perceived and historically mythologized in a foreign space.

Como se advirtió en un principio, uno de los aspectos más sorprendentes de la novela se relaciona con la acuciosa descripción del ambiente que se vivía en México durante la década de los setenta, en especial, el impacto que la ciudad ejerce sobre las aspiraciones juveniles de toda una generación: \"Pensé que era una escena ideal alrededor de la cual podían girar las imágenes o los deseos: un joven de un metro setenta y seis, con jeans y camiseta azul, detenido bajo el sol en el bordillo de la avenida más larga de América. De algún modo, se puede conjeturar que la descripción que hace Bolaño del Distrito Federal no solo compete el ámbito geográfico o el habla local propia de la capital de esa época, sino que en su mismo lirismo Bolaño transforma la ciudad en una alegoría de un tiempo y un espacio latinoamericano específico, confiriendo a la novela de la siempre necesaria unidad compositiva. Finalmente, si bien El espíritu de la ciencia-ficción pertenece a la etapa de producción literaria más temprana de Bolaño junto a Monsieur Pain (1984) y Consejos de un discípulo de Morrison a un fanático de Joyce (1984), se trata de una novela que permite no solo cartografiar con mayor detalle el universo bolañesco, sino que también, comprender el desarrollo literario posterior que lo llevará a escribir sus novelas más reconocidas Los detectives salvajes y 2666.

This thesis comprises two pieces of work – a novel and an accompanying research paper. The novel, Savage Things, is a story of a girl, removed from the home of her vulnerable mother to live with her grandparents for a summer. There, she falls in with various secondary characters: a gang of boys, the college-aged girl who lives upstairs, a housebound neighbour, and her wider family. As these relationships form, the girl feels increasingly conflicted about her own identity and her place in the world. However, the girl’s mother is not finished with her and reappears as the girl begins to find her feet in this new environment, taking her on a final trip that forces them to reconsider their relationship with each other and the world around them. The research paper, ‘She’s Leaving Home’, is an examination of three coming-of-age texts – Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar, and Eugene McCabe’s Death and Nightingales. The paper analyses all three novels via their relationship to the Bildungsroman as a form and questions the role that space plays in each. My discussion defines space in several ways – as a physical, psychological, and social concept. I argue that space is an essential component to the Bildungsroman in that it provides the context necessary for a protagonist to define herself against and within. It considers the prominent role that land plays and how it corresponds to each text’s political context – from the Depression-era transients of Housekeeping to the bitter land disputes of Death and Nightingales – while also arguing that each context assists in its protagonist’s coming-of-age.

In this timely study of the historical, ideological, and formal interdependencies of the novel and human rights, Joseph Slaughter demonstrates that the twentieth-century rise of ?world literature? and international human rights law are related phenomena. Slaughter argues that international law shares with the modern novel a particular conception of the human individual. The Bildungsroman, the novel of coming of age, fills out this image, offering a conceptual vocabulary, a humanist social vision, and a narrative grammar for what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and early literary theorists both call ?the free and full development of the human personality.?Revising our received understanding of the relationship between law and literature, Slaughter suggests that this narrative form has acted as a cultural surrogate for the weak executive authority of international law, naturalizing the assumptions and conditions that make human rights appear commonsensical. As a kind of novelistic correlative to human rights law, the Bildungsroman has thus been doing some of the sociocultural work of enforcement that the law cannot do for itself. This analysis of the cultural work of law and of the social work of literature challenges traditional Eurocentric histories of both international law and the dissemination of the novel. Taking his point of departure in Goethe?s Wilhelm Meister, Slaughter focuses on recent postcolonial versions of the coming-of-age story to show how the promise of human rights becomes legible in narrative and how the novel and the law are complicit in contemporary projects of globalization: in colonialism, neoimperalism, humanitarianism, and the spread of multinational consumer capitalism.Slaughter raises important practical and ethical questions that we must confront in advocating for human rights and reading world literature?imperatives that, today more than ever, are intertwined.

‘Bildungsroman’ and ‘coming-of-age’ are distinct terms used for literary genres that are largely similar, but that, in many ways, have been defined differently throughout time. Currently, both what they have in common and what they do not share can create confusion when studying genres or preparing an academic paper. This article aims to synthesise various points of view on the two. It proposes the use of sociology to better understand the developmental period in texts pertaining to one or the other genre.