Falling Short
A paradox haunts the bildungsroman: few protagonists successfully complete the process of maturation and socialization that ostensibly defines the form. From the despondent endings of Dickens’s Great Expectations and Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel to the suicide of Balzac’s Lucien de Rubempré and the demise of Eliot’s Maggie and Tom Tulliver, the nineteenth-century bildungsroman offers n...
A paradox haunts the bildungsroman: few protagonists successfully complete the process of maturation and socialization that ostensibly defines the form. From the despondent endings of Dickens’s Great Expectations and Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel to the suicide of Balzac’s Lucien de Rubempré and the demise of Eliot’s Maggie and Tom Tulliver, the nineteenth-century bildungsroman offers n...
