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The early nineteenth-century bildungsroman is often understood as a coming-of-age story of the protagonist, which implies that temporality is more constitutive for its composition than spatiality. In contrast, my paper focuses on the motif of travelling in German and British bildungsroman narratives. Opposed to the previous allegorical understanding of the Romantic bildungsroman, I suggest that the methods of the spatial humanities open up a new perspective on bildungsroman narratives by showing how their travel itineraries were used in the construction of Europe before and after the Napoleonic Wars. The itineraries annotated from the corpus suggest that the classic Grand Tour to Italy remain important, especially in German Romanticism, whereas northern regions are also popular in British texts. A few narratives emphasise the region of Greece in defining the European frontier in relation to the Ottoman Empire, while Russia and Poland are not popular settings for bildungsroman narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853), the Bildungsroman of Lucy Snowe is woven into her experience of the material culture in Villette where she is frequently rendered impotent by things. In the chapter 'Auld Lang Syne', Lucy's confusion over things reaches a climax with the presence of 'Bretton things'. These objects from the Bretton house in England first appear at the opening and then turn up again at La Terrasse in Labassecour. Although such objects initially shatter Lucy's consciousness, they play an important role in her journey towards self-establishment. Contrary to scholarly perspectives that suggest Lucy's selfhood is fragmented and lost amid the reappeared Bretton things, this paper argues that these objects enable Lucy to confront her suppressed passions and desires. Through her exploration, Lucy gradually moves beyond her dependence on the Bretton things and people and succeeds in adjusting the understatedness of British materiality with the materiality of Villette. This paper aims to reveal how Lucy's relationship with the materiality of objects empowers her to face life's adversities. As Lucy narrates her story, she demonstrates a profound understanding of how to live among the shadows of death, with objects becoming the tangible threads that connect the past, present and future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning from Jack London's Martin Eden (1909), a famous American Bildungsroman, this article invokes Bakhtin's chronotope to better understand a contemporary cinematic discourse predicated on the cultural maintenance of the post-Enlightenment masculine subject. Tracing the development of the Bildung genre-as-chronotope across key examples of post-war and contemporary Italian cinema – Fellini's I Vitelloni (1953), Leone's Once Upon a Time in America (1984) – I compare Pietro Marcello's (2019) adaptation of Martin Eden with Paolo Sorrentino's The Hand of God (2021). Where the latter's ending reimagines the conclusion of I Vitelloni, Martin Eden is the filmic equivalent of the modernist novel's deconstruction of the nineteenth-century realist novel's spatio-temporal and epistemological boundaries. And, where Sorrentino's alter-ego protagonist must leave Naples for Rome in order to succeed as a filmmaker, Marcello's intermedial evocation of Naples amplifies the book's paean to socialism while reproducing, in another modality, the failure of London's intended critique of individualism. Finally, in none of these films is the invisibly essential masculinity of the subject superseded by a post-humanist alternative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes Madeline Miller's Circe in relation to the contemporary trend of women's mythological retellings of marginalized female characters. Because of Circe's first-person narrative, Miller's book has been interpreted and marketed as empowering and feminist; however, Circe 's narrative structure rather reaffirms the ideological assumptions underlying the 'masculine' Bildungsroman , where the female character's individual experience is defined by romance and she is ultimately excluded from the social scene. The dichotomy between the marketing rhetoric of empowerment and the novel's actual narrative structure stimulates a broader reflection about the ideological implication of this novelistic trend as a whole. On the one hand, these novels exploit the well-established exemplary value of Graeco-Roman antiquity to offer a new version of the classical canon which accommodates the critiques of radical movements like feminism; on the other hand, they appropriate the progressive aura of such movements to secure a broader audience while in fact leaving power imbalances unquestioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines how Daphne du Maurier's 1938 novel Rebecca maps the bildungsroman journey of self-development in youth onto the process of self-decline in age, creating an uncanny structure that forfeits the climactic achievement of an ultimate self as bodied forth by the traditional novel. This ultimate self is a fantasy of Western individualism that reflects its historical devaluation of the limitations of the body and the associated necessity of human interdependence and care. The limited selfhood achieved by the narrator undercuts the individualist ideal of perpetual self-expansion and leaves her haunted by its fantasy of aristocratic power, represented by the Manderley estate and its former mistress, the titular first Mrs. de Winter. The concrete losses attributable to the aging process thus double in Rebecca as the subversion of individualism's ideal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article, titled "Eleven Close-Up Views on the Japanese Imaginary," by Rodica Frenţiu, explores various perspectives on the Japanese culture and its imaginary. The book focuses on significant authors throughout different ages and analyzes their works to understand their individual literary and cultural views. The author uses a methodology that combines close reading and distant reading to provide a comprehensive understanding of the Japanese imaginary. The book also discusses topics such as translation, culinary traditions, and cross-cultural interactions. Overall, the article offers a unique and insightful exploration of the Japanese culture and its diverse perspectives. [Extracted from the article]

Kevin Kuhn's novel Hikikomori is a postmodern Entwicklungsroman. In this essay, I read the novel as a subversion of the neoliberal paradigm, which manifests itself in an omnipresence of self-optimisation options, that the protagonist Till is constantly encouraged to take advantage of. By withdrawing into his room and creating a collaborative online world, Till rejects the cult of individuality modelled by his plastic surgeon father and his interior designer mother. Rather than going on a scheduled journey of self-enhancement around the world, I will argue that it is his virtual journey that attempts self-realisation. However, this rejection of a Weltanschauung based on economic principles comes at the price of exclusion from the analogue world, which bears many parallels with one of the most famous 20th century German language novellas: Franz Kafka's Die Verwandlung. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the impact of Hurricane Katrina—which hit parts of the U.S. South, especially New Orleans, in 2005—on African American coming-of-age novels. In particular, we argue that Hurricane Katrina constitutes a watershed moment in African American coming-of-age narratives, bringing about changes in identity formation and self-realization concerns that are typically associated with preKatrina African American coming-of-age novels. To develop our argument, we study two post-Katrina African American coming-of-age narratives: Ninth Ward (2010) by Jewell Parker Rhodes and Salvage the Bones (2011) by Jesmyn Ward. We suggest that these two narratives exemplify those changes through conforming to the Black Radical Tradition, as theorized by Cedric Robinson. The two novels, we show, not only lay bare the systemic racism that came to the fore in the aftermath of the hurricane but also highlight African Americans’ resistance strategies in the face of such racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article pays tribute to Katerina Clark, a renowned scholar in Russian literature and cultural history, who passed away in 2024. The author, Evgeny Dobrenko, shares his personal and professional relationship with Clark, highlighting her groundbreaking work on Soviet literature. Clark's book, "The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual," challenged traditional approaches to studying Soviet literature and introduced new avenues of research. Dobrenko praises Clark's ability to blend literary theory with a fresh perspective, enabling her to uncover the true essence and structure of Soviet literature. The article discusses Clark's work, emphasizing her unique approach as a literary historian and interpreter. She relied on her imagination, extensive knowledge, and conceptualization skills rather than relying solely on established theoretical frameworks. Clark's book explored the antihero in Socialist Realist novels and the de-historicization of history during Stalinism. She also emphasized the role of aesthetics in shaping political discourse and representational practices. Clark's work has had a significant impact on post-Soviet Russian studies, opening up new dimensions in the study of Stalinism. [Extracted from the article]

This article offers a comparative reading of Italo Svevo and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar's mock-development novels in light of the history of economic development in Italy and Turkey and their trajectories of integration into global capitalism. These authors from the semi-peripheries of Euromodernity employ strikingly similar modernist techniques in order to unsettle the bildungsroman and its humanist ideals. This article argues that the farcical use of psychoanalysis as a thematic attack on the unity of the subject, chronopathology in both form and content, and parody in style, situation, and plot represent peripheral narrative strategies developed as a response to being always already late vis-a-vis the hegemonic core culture. The classical bildungsroman is comically distorted and creatively adapted to the peripheral condition, becoming a key vehicle for reflecting on disintegrated subject positions, temporal shifts, untimely interruptions, and discordances. The form is simultaneously subverted and creatively adapted to the peripheral condition, reflecting the inevitable encounter with the hegemonic culture and the nation-state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The twentieth century is witness to a revival of interest in the bildungsroman as writers, especially from postcolonies in the Global South, turn to it to reflect on concerns of history, culture, and social life in a postcolonial setting. Scholars, however, disagree regarding the nature of these reworkings. Some see them as a continuation of the original European models established by Goethe, Dickens, and other European writers. Others find such associations Eurocentric and call for more local standards of evaluation. This article examines this debate by looking closely at a version of the postcolonial bildungsroman proposed by the Kannada writer U. R. Ananthamurthy in his 1965 novel Samskara. The novel follows an orthodox Brahmin priest from Karnataka who, disillusioned by the corruption and moral decay in his community, embarks on a pilgrimage to rediscover his identity in the rapidly modernizing world of twentieth‐century India. Ananthamurthy's bildungsroman, while retaining some structural similarities, departs from European models in fundamental ways. The motif of the hero's journey, for instance, is flipped. The novel tracks the hero's growing discontentment with his community leading to a sense of communal alienation, thus inverting the European journey‐trajectory that typically follows the hero's movement toward social integration. It also deviates from the generic Western rags‐to‐riches storyline that complements that hero's road to social integration. Instead, it adopts the narrative structure of the Niti‐shastra, a set of precolonial Hindu texts that teach about the wise conduct of life. Such readings not only facilitate fresh ways of understanding the relationship between the Western and the postcolonial models, but they also allow new insights into understanding how South Asian authors utilize the bildungsroman to rediscover precolonial and classical works through modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

La novela de formación se ha caracterizado, de acuerdo con Franco Moretti, por elevar la juventud a categoría simbólica de la modernidad, acentuándose entre sus atributos la inquietud, la movilidad y la transitoriedad. En las novelas Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), de Edwidge Danticat, y L'Exil selon Julia (1996), de Gisèle Pineau, leídas desde el marco genérico del Bildungsroman, analizo el proceso de aprendizaje de las jóvenes protagonistas, en paralelo con el de mujeres mayores de su familia. En ambas novelas, las mujeres mayores tienen un rol clave, si no protagónico. Asimismo, las jóvenes intentan que estas mujeres mayores aprendan a leer y escribir, de manera que asumen un rol típicamente asociado con las personas adultas. De acuerdo con Yolanda Doub, el viaje, o traslado, ya sea dentro del mismo barrio o al extranjero, desencadena las experiencias de aprendizaje de los jóvenes protagonistas en las novelas de formación. En el caso de las novelas aquí analizadas, la migración propicia experiencias significativas de aprendizaje tanto para las jóvenes como para las mujeres mayores. La flexibilización de los típicos roles etarios, según los cuales las jóvenes aprenden, y las adultas enseñan, da paso a una serie intercambios intergeneracionales en los que las inquietudes, condensadas en escenas de lectura y escritura ligadas al ocio, desafían los ciclos de reproducción social de mujeres afrodescendientes y trabajadoras, así como las crono-normativas. Bildungsroman, Caribe, edad, ocio, migración. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the representation of women's bodies in the narratives of Și se auzeau greierii (And Crickets Could Be Heard) by Corina Sabău, ca și cum nimic nu s-ar fi întâmplat (as if nothing has happened) by Alina Nelega, and Viața e a mea (The Life is Mine) by Emilia Faur. It explores how the portrayal of maternity, sexual abuse, abortion, and gender identity changes from Romanian Communism to the capitalist democracy. If the socialist women were submissive to the pronatalist desiderate, being oppressed because of the insalubrious abortions (Sabău) or because of the fear to affirm their gender identity (Nelega), the capitalist advertisement with its sexist standards of beauty, doubled by the postnatal depression, imposes the fatality of death (Faur). My objective is to connect feminist aesthetics with ideological critique by identifying the abstract model of a feminist Bildungsroman (Rita Felski) in the three novels under consideration. However, on a formal level, I will analyse how in the case of Faur's and Nelega's novels, the free indirect style, a blend of affect translated into impersonal form (Moretti), mediates a socio-political commentary for increased awareness and active engagement in dismantling the adaptable patriarchy inherent in any political system, while the first-person narrative (Sabău) shows how the social fabric is internalised by the narrator, following her inner turmoil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a mixture of structural homage and ironic reference, Zadie Smith's fragmentary, polyvocal novel NW (2012) cannily adapts the imperatives of the classic bildungsroman from a nineteenth-century national-industrial context to a contemporary global frame. Within NW 's four main narratives of formation, education and individual ambition serve not to cultivate and fulfill, but to frustrate, fail, or fragment. As a counterpoint to its negative assessment of education and linear progression, however, NW 's thorough manipulation of the logic of formation highlights the novel's capacity to reorient readers' modes of attention and empathy as conditioned by alterity, to use Dorothy Hale's term. Drawing on Smith's essays, I suggest that NW 's experimental novelistic techniques present alternative forms of education for the reader: a range of indeterminate and uncertain "lessons," dependent on singular encounters with the text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

U R Ananthamurthy's novel Samskara and Ashapurna Devi's bildungsroman The First Promise were published in consecutive years and have some striking similarities in the sociocultural issues they highlight. Together, they provide a comprehensive view of a society on the brink of social transformation from a predominantly religious one, to one governed by a constitutional secular democracy. Even though the transition seems easy in theory, certain recent legal and cultural events beg a re-examination of the politics of sacred and profane. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores Fu Lei's Family Letters, 1954–1966 (1981) as an accidental then aborted künstlerroman for the newly established People's Republic of China. It suggests that Fu's private epistolary transformation of the bildungsroman is an important undercurrent of Chinese socialist literature and a telling participation in the utopian historical-aesthetic project of socialist subject formation. Reading the Family Letters as a coincidental socialist bildungsroman allows us to see Fu's "heart and mind's journey" in the early decades of the People's Republic, challenging the dichotomous framework with which the relationship between the Chinese state and its intellectuals is often understood. More importantly, it allows insights into Fu's vision of the artistic bildung and its implication for a New China. Through Fu's narrative preoccupation with Jean-Christophe, and in contrast to the officially orchestrated New Folk Songs movement (1958), this understanding of the correspondence as a Romantic bildungsroman with two protagonists probes the question of the possibilities of a socialist developmental narrative, of agency and participation in the emergence of new subjectivity, and of the role of the artist in New China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1933, Virginia Woolf published Flush: A Biography, an experimental novel in animal narrative that records the life story of Elizabeth Browning’s pet dog. It receives scant scholarship, and critics treat it as serious work only to the extent that it is not concerned about dogs. It is the progress in animal studies that inspires more scholars to re-evaluate Flush as a biography of a dog. In this respect, this paper explores Woolf’s response to the form that Flush adopts, Bildungsroman, by the use of Gregory Castle’s theory of modernist Bildungsroman. Through a close reading of Flush, this paper attempts to investigate the author’s modernist canine presentation that parts with the tradition of Bildung. The present paper starts with an introduction to the relationship between modernism and the genre of Bildungsroman. Then, this paper continues to examine the author’s experiments in narrative and socialization that differentiate Flush from the tradition of canine Bildung. The nonhuman subjectivity demonstrated in the narrative of the cocker spaniel critiques the anthropocentrism that shapes the characters in animal biography. Additionally, the rejection of the hierarchy of breed and the dog’s embracing his identity as a mongrel embody Woolf’s pursuit of freedom in the autonomous Bildung plot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Combining different literary and formal dimensions, Dipti Ranjan Pattanaik's novel The Life and Times of Banka Harichandan is a coming-of-age story in which we follow the psychological and moral growth of a young boy for more than a decade, from childhood to college. It is the story of Banka Harichandan and his journey to understand himself, family, and community, and, gradually, the world beyond, a philosophical and psychological journey from fear to freedom. Form and theme reflect each other in this composite novel where connections on structural levels reinforce continuities and discontinuities on the levels of theme, characterization, and narration, underpinning the central theme of the hero's development and his turning to writing. Pondering universal questions concerning God's omnipotence as related to the suffering in the world, the eponymous hero moves through conflict, desire, and disappointment toward an increasingly enlightened state of mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Theological Dickens" is a book that explores Charles Dickens' opinions on the Christian faith and its role in Victorian culture. While the collection covers various aspects of Dickens' work, such as his views on material culture and social justice, it does not extensively discuss the theological dimensions of his writing. The book also examines how Dickens grappled with questions of literal truth in the Bible and the teleological implications of evolutionary science. Some contributors challenge Dickens' anti-Catholicism and explore the relationship between his work and Catholic social teaching. Overall, the book offers diverse perspectives on Dickens' religious beliefs but falls short in providing a comprehensive analysis of his theology. [Extracted from the article]

This article focuses on the Bengali novel হাজার চুরাশির মা (Mother of 1084) by Mahasweta Devi to read it as a rewriting of Maxim Gorky's The Mother. It contends that Mother of 1084 recasts Gorky's radical and gendered bildungsroman for the context of India where it not only documents the development of the radical consciousness of Sujata, the mother of the revolutionary Brati killed by the Indian state, but also the patriarchal structure of the Indian/Bengali family. Furthermore, it argues that the Bengali novel recasts the socialist realism of the Russian novel into modernist Bengali prose. It examines Mahasweta's deployment of the modernist aesthetic while locating Mother of 1084 in a broader tradition of actually existing communist artistic praxis in South Asia to illuminate the tradition of committed modernism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Great Expectations suggest the possibility of individual growth and formation leading to maturity and fulfilment, but in each case the hero's development is problematic. Progress is not linear; it is marked by detours and is threatened or undercut by elements of stasis when time – and life – seems to stop, but equally the hero's development seems to depend on these moments of stasis. In Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre a number of characters close to Wilhelm, primarily female characters, demonstrate an inability or refusal to engage with life that may be associated with sickness, introversion or the inability to manage past trauma – or indeed the transcendence offered by art and beauty. In Great Expectations Pip's development as a moral person is undercut by his illusion that the deathly Miss Haversham has plans to provide him with the wealth and social status to put him on a level with Estella. His social advancement as 'a gentleman' thus hinders his true development as a moral person and produces a temporary moral stasis. Nevertheless, in both novels the female characters associated with stasis play an essential part in setting the hero on a course that promises positive development and self-fulfilment. In the end, though, neither author is entirely able to resolve the tensions within their idea of development, which seems to run counter to the idea of stasis but also, somehow, to require it: correspondingly, the endings of both novels are open and uncertain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bildungsroman as a sub-genre of narrative fiction depicts a person's maturing journey in which one encounters harsh realities of the world, grows through diverse experiences, and eventually finds oneself and one's place in the world; it is essentially about a person's initiation into society. In this essay, I borrow R.W.B. Lewis's coinage "denitiation" and delineate an alternative pattern to the socially oriented individual development in literature, one in which the hero's encounter with the world leads to insurmountable disillusionment and ends with renunciation or retreat; it turns out to be an initiation out of the world. I illustrate the literature of denitiation with examples from European, American, and Chinese literatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp have surfaced and challenged ideas about masculinity in popular conversations. In particular, these ideas have centered around "toxic masculinity"--a version of masculinity that reflects stereotyped, dated, and even dangerous expectations for manhood. This notion of masculinity can be reinforced in a number of ways, especially through pop culture, where it runs the risk of becoming commonly accepted or normalized. This study evaluates the narratives of masculinity in three different novels that are marketed toward high school-aged students in the United States: Lord of the Flies; Gabi, A Girl in Pieces; and Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. Using a critical literacy lens, this study considers the symbols, behaviors, expectations, and meanings given to masculinity in and through each novel and considers the implications of this analysis for adolescent readership inside and outside of schooling. The study concludes that the more contemporary novels showcase a range of masculine portrayals, including positive, affirming versions of masculinity, compared to a more singular and pessimistic one found in a novel traditionally used in schools. Thus, the study concludes that formal schooling may be an important way to address and disrupt unhealthy versions of masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Hegel's book The Phenomenology of Spirit can be read as a Bildungsroman or a theory of reception. Hegel (as he appears in this book) sets forth to educate his readers to a historical understanding. This is the article's main argument which will be split up in three parts. First, it seems that Hegel tries to lead the uneducated reader to his own ideal philosophy. If so, the reception will be merely technical, i.e., the book has only one answer and the reader has to submit to Hegel to get him right. The article argues against such a reading. Secondly, it seems more likely that Hegel invites his readers to take an active part in the interpretation of the book. To substantiate this claim, the article argues that the hitherto unknown phenomenon in the book "touches" and challenges the reader, who must "touch" back and accept the challenge in order to grasp the phenomenon. This reception involves the experience of "touch" (not physical) and is therefore haptic. Thirdly, and in extension of the haptic reception, the article argues that there is a reception as recollection, meaning that Hegel invites the reader to reflect upon the recollected experiences or "the gallery of images" that Hegel has archived in his book. In doing so, the reader will see the gallery of images with new eyes—which ultimately is a process of Bildung as the reader gains self-awareness and knowledge through Hegel's images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work on crime fiction has highlighted the genre's increasingly transnational focus and the growing number of migrant detectives. Matsotsi , a little-known Nyanja text published in Zambia in the early 1960s, provides a much earlier example of this figure in Sergeant Balala, an Angolan detective fighting to contain the tsotsi menace in Johannesburg, South Africa. Matsotsi , however, does more than point to cross-border detection as a means of elucidating transnational relationships. Shonga and Zulu's text manipulates the genres of the detective novel and the bildungsroman to tell a story about the relationships among the individual, the state, and the wider region at a key moment in southern African history, when Zambia and Malawi were on the cusp of independence. Although African language writing has often been considered too localized to be used for nationalist purposes, here it is mobilized for the purpose of state-making in a transnational context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frequently Jane Eyre (1847) has been compared to various fairy tales, many of which are seemingly woven through the plot and characters of the novel. Largely unremarked upon however is the effect of those fairy tales on the form of the novel itself, particularly as those fairy tales collide with the Bildungsroman genre. Rather than reaffirming the telos-driven nature of both the fairy tale and the Bildungsroman, Charlotte Brontë, through Jane as narrator and protagonist, questions the narrative finality of both genres through their combination. The resultant Bildungsroman actively eschews any potential ossification of Jane as she invents and reinvents herself in her narration and deployment of narrative forms. Rather than a singular finished figure at the end of the novel, Jane offers a spectrum of identities that continue to grow and change from their initial contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers an allegorical interpretation of the ostensibly realist elements of Anne Brontë's 1847 novel Agnes Grey. Read non-allegorically, Agnes Grey appears to depict the triumph of the governess Agnes's moral will over her desires that conflict with her duties, as occurs in the Bildungsroman. But the novel can also be seen as using Agnes's evolving relationship with her pupils to consider the ideal way to prioritise and respond to the various impulses of the self and various members of a social community. The plot can then be seen as progressing towards the anti-hierarchical model of self and community that Brontë deems most ethical. This community largely corresponds to Talia Schaffer's community of care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines Luis Martín-Santos’ second novel, Time of Destruction, unfinished at the time of his accidental death in 1964, in connection with James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). To date, Marisol Morales-Ladrón remains the only scholar who has dealt extensively with both texts (2005: 162-182), a sharp contrast to the numerous studies that have discussed the traces of Joyce’s Ulyssesin Martín-Santos’ first novel, Time of Silence (1962). The publication, in 2022, of Mauricio Jalón’s new edition of MartínSantos’ Time of Destruction, one with significant textual amendments to the first edition (1975), provides an ideal opportunity to expand the scholarship on this scarcely researched topic. The first section of this essay offers a brief discussion of the new edition of Martín-Santos’ novel and reconsiders it in relation to Joyce’s work. The second section proposes a reading of A Portrait and Time of Destruction in light of the tension that exists between the narrators and the two main fictional figures in these novels, Stephen Dedalus and Agustín. The final section considers both novels in relation to Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy of history and morality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the forestry themes in Norman Maclean's novella USFS 1919: The Ranger, The Cook, and a Hole in the Sky. It discusses the relationship between beauty and utility in the depiction of the forest as a place of labor and social relationships. The article also examines Maclean's connection to the United States Forest Service and his experiences as a young narrator working in the Forest Service in 1919. It delves into the challenging nature of the work and the solitude and self-reflection that comes with being a fire lookout. The article also explores the use of storytelling and self-reflection in Maclean's work, as well as the blending of his roles as a ranger and an artist. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Diablotexto Digital is the property of Diablotexto Digital and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Diablotexto Digital is the property of Diablotexto Digital and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Diablotexto Digital is the property of Diablotexto Digital and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Diablotexto Digital is the property of Diablotexto Digital and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Diablotexto Digital is the property of Diablotexto Digital and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

V.S. Naipaul is one of the widely read postcolonial writers. He was born in Trinidad in 1932, had roots in India, migrated to England for higher studies and took British citizenship. He died as a British citizen in 2018. His writings distinguish themselves in having a wider coverage of the postcolonial world, like the trajectory of his life, and accordingly larger experience with the problems of this world. In the same line, he has a world readership. However, the greater part of this readership sees him as a colonial and offensive writer rather than voicing their issues and suggesting solutions to them. However, the discourse of Naipaul, as it evolves in the texts like Half a Life and Magic Seeds, being explored in this paper, is quite different and tends to have a counter-discourse to such views; it is neither colonial nor offensive. It can be seen pointing to larger future possibilities beyond the crisis of the postcolonial world and this can be understood in the light of the terms like historical sensibility, mimicry, rupture and bildungsroman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elaine Feeney's novel As You Were offers the story of a terminal cancer patient who forsakes any medical treatment. Narrating the final moments of her protagonist's life, the author breaks with the traditional cancer novel formula in which a bellicose stance is prescriptive. Instead, the heroine's stay at a hospital ward with other female patients constitutes Feeney's point of departure for writing a state-of-the-nation novel. The article discusses how the merging of different literary traditions, such as cancer narrative, literature of witness, or experimental fiction, allows the author to paint a poignant picture of Irish society, in which women, whose rights were historically curbed, empower each other through telling their life stories as well as reclaiming the life tales of their lost sisters. The analysis focuses on metaphors and narrative strategies that customarily underpin cancer stories and which can be identified in the novel. Secondly, the subversion of the cancer narrative is taken under scrutiny to demonstrate the experimental character of Feeney's novel. Subsequently, the ethical dimension of storytelling is given critical attention and the work's status as a state-of-thenation novel is elaborated on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article discusses the character Samba Diallo from Cheikh Hamidou Kane's novel "L'Aventure ambiguë," focusing on his pursuit of philosophy in France and the fatal consequences it leads to upon his return to Senegal. It also explores similar themes in other African novels, particularly the concept of philosophical suicide and failure in intellectual pursuits. The analysis by Jeanne-Marie Jackson in "The African Novel of Ideas" challenges traditional critical perspectives on African literature, emphasizing the importance of intellectual projects and philosophical exploration in literary works that may not conform to mainstream expectations. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses Gretchen Braun's book, "Narrating Trauma: Victorian Novels and Modern Stress Disorders," which examines the concept of trauma in Victorian literature and its relevance to modern understandings of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Braun argues for a broader definition of trauma that includes gradual and accidental forms of psychic harm, as well as the effects of microaggressions and constant awareness of danger experienced by marginalized groups. The book analyzes Victorian novels such as "Villette" and "Jude the Obscure" to demonstrate how characters who may be seen as morally ambiguous or unlikeable should be viewed as victims of trauma. The article praises Braun's study for its clarity and thorough grasp of relevant scientific and literary criticism. Another book mentioned in the article is Cody Marrs' "Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling about the Civil War," which explores the persistent narratives surrounding the Civil War and their impact on contemporary incidents. The article highlights Marrs' engaging writing style and the book's potential to reach a wider audience. [Extracted from the article]

This study aims to tackle positive and negative intergroup contact in school and out‐of‐school contexts to test whether a spillover effect (i.e., the extent to which experiences that individuals have in one context spill over into another) applies to intergroup contact. Participants were 984 adolescents (Mage = 14.66; 62.7% female; 24.8% ethnic minority). Results indicated that positive contact in school was related over time to higher positive contact in out‐of‐school contexts and vice versa (i.e., valence consistent spillover effect). Positive contact in school was linked over time to lower negative contact in out‐of‐school contexts (i.e., valence inconsistent spillover effect). Overall, this study provides novel insights into the transmission of adolescents' intergroup contact across socialization contexts by emphasizing the leading role of positive contact in schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship on the bildungsroman highlights the ideological implications of bildung in relation to empire and human rights discourse. This essay adds to that scholarship by reading the postcolonial bildungsroman as an expression of the erosion of national sovereignty after decolonization. Bildung in post-SAP (Structural Adjustment Program) novels is contested because the development of a fully modern personality—rational, cosmopolitan, economically agentive, entrepreneurial, nonadversarial—privileged by modernization theory and global institutions symbolically undermines the political sovereignty promised by decolonization. Through an analysis of Pankaj Mishra's The Romantics, this essay argues that such contestation of bildung in post-SAP postcolonial bildungsromans generates narratives of negation in which the imagining of bildung is always deferred to imaginative and political futures. In The Romantics, bildung turns into an enduring historical trauma; Mishra juxtaposes various trajectories of individual and national growth both before and after India's adoption of SAP policies in 1991 to show how the symbolic realization of full and free personality development would paradoxically negate the claims to sovereignty that elevate such personality development as an expression of successful modernization. In The Romantics, as in Chimamanda Adichie's Purple Hibiscus and Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, the negation of successful bildung—and the deferral of fully formed visions of "development"—become the only registers in which to register liberatory growth in the peripheries of the capitalist world-economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article represents an attempt to read Anatoly Kuznetsov's Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel in its complete and uncensored version (published 1970) as a novel of education. Critical interpretation of this text has been dominated by the story of the mass shootings of the Jewish population witnessed by the adolescent Tolya, with the youngster's own story often relegated to the background. But the analytic framework of the Bildungsroman makes it possible to see how, in addition to serving as a testimonial of the "Holocaust by Bullets," the book demonstrates the full extent of the deformation of a child under conditions of war and occupation. The theoretical apparatus of the analysis is largely based on research in narratological theory (Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan). Discussion of the structural features of an autobiography of childhood also draws on Kate Douglas's studies on autobiography, trauma, and memory. As a process of socialization, Bildung in Babi Yar turns into an anti-Bildung of adolescence: Kuznetsov's novel shows how the experience of war deforms the personality on a variety of perceptual levels—optical, olfactory, haptic, and sonic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adventure Time is an animated series and bildungsroman, centered on the primary protagonist, Finn, and the normative prescriptions of identity as represented in his growth. The series evolves to offer nuanced and alternative representations of fluidity and the queer body, and the current research investigates queer potentiality in this speculative fiction/fantasy text. By weaving together extant understandings of bodies and animation with theories of the queer body, this analysis uses fluidity to examine queerness in Adventure Time. Further, it proposes that the body is one site—along with constructs of family, gender, and time—where fluidity may represent queerness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]