Goethe and the Myth of the Bildungsroman

Goethe''s Willhelm Meister novels, widely held to be the most significant and influential in all of German literature, have traditionally been classed as Bildungsroman, or ''novels of formation''. In Goethe and the Myth of Bildungsroman, Frederick Amrine offers a unique reading of Wilhelm Meister''s Lehrjahre and Wilhelm Meister''s Wanderjahre, which posits the second novel as a sequel to the firs...