SOURCE: Mahoney, Dennis F. “The Apprenticeship of the Reader: The Bildungsroman of the ‘Age of Goethe.’” In Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman, edited by James N. Hardin, pp. 97-117. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Mahoney proposes that Bildungsromane have a unique impact and influence upon their readers.

When dealing with the novels of German Classicism and Romanticism, sooner or later one must consider the question whether the term Bildungsroman is useful for understanding and interpreting these works.¹ That the term has a long history no one can deny; as Fritz Martini has shown, Karl Morgenstern had begun to use the word Bildungsroman as early as 1810 to describe the novels not only of Goethe and the Romantics, but specifically those of his friend Friedrich Maximilian Klinger.² Above all, however, it was Wilhelm Dilthey who brought the term into general usage. In the...