SOURCE: Sammons, Jeffrey L. “The Mystery of the Missing Bildungsroman, or: What Happened to Wilhelm Meister's Legacy?” Genre 14, no. 2 (summer 1981): 229-46.

In the following essay, Sammons questions the very existence of a Bildungsroman genre, contending that only—at most—four novels conform to Bildungsroman conventions.

If a person interested in literary matters commands as many as a dozen words of German, one of them is likely to be: Bildungsroman. And what this person is likely to know about the term is that it denominates a novel genre particular if not exclusive to Germany in the nineteenth century; moreover, he will think of it as a binary term, distinguishing the characteristic German novel from the more familiar English, French, and American traditions of the same time. Here is an example illustrating the diffusion of this belief, drawn, not from scholarly discussion, but from the wider literate environment. It is...