The Way of the World : The Bildungsroman in European Culture

A combination of narrative theory and social history, this new edition includes an additional final chapter on the collapse of the Bildungsroman in the years around World War I (a crisis which opened the way for Modernist experimentation).

Wilhelm Meister, Elizabeth Bennet, Julien Sorel, Rastignac, Jane Eyre, Bazaroz, Dorothea Brooke ... the golden age of the European novel discovers a new collective protagonist: youth. It is problematic and restless youth—"strange" characters, as their own creators often say—arising from the downfall of traditional societies. But even more than that, youth is the symbolic figure for European modernity: that sudden mix of great expectations and lost illusions that the bourgeois world learns to "read", and to accept, as if it were a novel.<br><i>The Way of the World</i>, with its unique combination of narrative theory and social history, interprets the <i>Bildungsroman</i> as the great cultural mediator of nineteenth-century Europe: a form which explores the many strange compromises between revolution and restoration, economic take-off and aesthetic pleasure, individual autonomy and social normality. This new edition includes an additional final chapter on the collapse of the <i>Bildungsroman</i> in the years around the First World War (a crisis which opened the way for modernist experiments), and a new preface in which the author looks back at <i>The Way of the World</i> in the light of his more recent work.