Table of Contents

Introduction Part I. Spirituality Giovanna Summerfield 1. Mastery and Apprenticeship(s): Departing from Goethe's Turm 2. The British Master: Defoe, Dickens and Kipling 3. The French Fellow Craft: Voltaire, Prévost, Stendhal 4. The Italian Apprentice: Foscolo, Collodi 5. From Bildungsroman to Bildungsreise Part II. Gender Lisa Downward 6. The Dissolution of Gendered Plots: Wilhelm Meister and the Beautiful Soul 7. Female Developments in the Nineteenth Century: Neera's Teresa, Lydia and L'indomani, George Eliot's Middlemarch, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre 8. Female Developments in the Twentieth Century: Sibilla Aleramo's Una donna, Susanna Tamaro's Va' dove ti porta il cuore, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse 9. The Bildungsroman as Spectrum Conclusion Bibliography Index

Promotional Information

Presents new critical approaches to the Bildungsroman by analyzing spiritual, feminist, historicist and modernist perspectives.

About the Author

Giovanna Summerfield is Associate Professor of Italian and French at Auburn University, USA.
Lisa Downward is Assistant Professor of Italian at Marist College, New York, USA.

Reviews

An essential book that re-orients thinking about a vexed literary genre, bringing out the Masonic background of the Bildungsroman and convincingly presenting the important contribution of women on its variable spectrum.
*Burton Pike, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, City University of New York Graduate Center, USA*

Giovanna Summerfield and Lisa Downward place Woolf in an unusually broad and comparative context in their New Perspectives on the European Bildungsroman, tracing the development of the genre from what they argue are its roots in Masonic tradition and literature.
*Years Work in English Studies, vol 91, no 1, 2012*