SOURCE: “Ghostly Bildung: Gender, Genre, Aesthetic Ideology, and Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,” in Genre, Vol. 26, No. 4, Winter, 1993, pp. 377-407.

In the following essay, Redfield highlights aesthetic and gender representation in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, evaluating the novel and its relationship to the genre of the Bildungsroman.

For the being of Geist has an essential connection with the idea of Bildung.

—Gadamer

Whoever could manage to interpret Goethe's Meister properly would have expressed what is now happening in literature. He could, so far as literary criticism is concerned, retire forever.

—Friedrich Schlegel

Among the challenges the modern novel offers to genre theory, that of the Bildungsroman is remarkable on several counts. Few literary terms have known greater success, both in the academy and in high culture generally, and in any number of national or linguistic contexts. “If a person interested in literary matters commands as many as a dozen words of...