SOURCE: Kontje, Todd. “Bildung and the German Novel (1774-1848).” In The German Bildungsroman: History of a National Genre, pp. 1-22. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1993.

In the following essay, Kontje traces the origins of Bildungsroman theory, and the impact and critical reception of Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.

The belated introduction of the term Bildungsroman into the general critical vocabulary requires us to trace two separate strands of thought in writing the history of the genre, namely the concept of Bildung and the theory of the novel (der Roman). During the last decades of the eighteenth century several prominent German writers began to redefine Bildung: the formerly religious term now became a secular humanistic concept. This transformation occurred at a time when the Germans witnessed an astonishing increase in the number of novels published each year. As novel production soared and suspicion of the reading habit grew among church...