SOURCE: Hirsch, Marianne. “The Novel of Formation as Genre: Between Great Expectations and Lost Illusions.” Genre 12, no. 3 (fall 1979): 293-311.

In the following essay, first delivered as a lecture in 1975, Hirsch considers the Bildungsroman a European literary genre rather than a strictly German one, and outlines the differences between German Bildungsromane and those of France and England.

If the Bildungsroman has been considered a primarily German genre, it has been for reasons that are extra-literary in nature. The Bildungsroman expresses, theorists starting with Wilhelm Dilthey have argued, the individualism and interest in self-cultivation valued by German culture.¹ In contrast, as Thomas Mann points out in a 1923 lecture, the public and political orientation of Western Europe (France and England) has produced the panoramic novel of social criticism.² Such claims, true as they might be, obscure significant formal and thematic links among such important novels as Stendhal's Le Rouge et le...