SOURCE: Kardux, Joke. “The Politics of Genre, Gender, and Canon-Formation: The Early American Bildungsroman and Its Subversions.” In Rewriting the Dream: Reflections on the Changing American Literary Canon, edited by W. M. Verhoeven, pp. 177-201. Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Atlanta, Ga.: Rodopi, 1992.

In the following essay, Kardux maintains that eighteenth-century social changes that altered family relationships made the nineteenth century uniquely suited for the burgeoning Bildungsroman genre in both Europe and the United States. Kardux also states that Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography is the prototypical American Bildungsroman, and examines how works by Herman Melville and Elizabeth Stoddard adhered to or subverted the genre.

It is surely no coincidence that the century that gave rise to the first general and literary histories of the United States was also the century in which the Bildungsroman became one of the most popular genres in American literature. Following the organic theory of history, George...