Falling Short: The Bildungsroman and the Crisis of Self-Fashioning
Aleksandar Stević, "Falling Short: The Bildungsroman and the Crisis of Self-Fashioning"
English | ISBN: 0813944031 | 2020 | 262 pages | PDF | 6 MB
English | ISBN: 0813944031 | 2020 | 262 pages | PDF | 6 MB
A paradox haunts the bildungsroman: few protagonists successfully complete the process of maturation and socialization that ostensibly defines the form. From the despondent endings of Dickens’s Great Expectations and Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel to the suicide of Balzac’s Lucien de Rubempré and the demise of Eliot’s Maggie and Tom Tulliver, the nineteenth-century bildungsroman offers narratives of failure, paralysis, and destruction: goals cannot be achieved, identities are impossible to forge, and the narrative of socialization routinely crumbles. Examining the novels of Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Henry James, Samuel Butler, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust,
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