As a genre of becoming and formation, the Bildungsroman cannot escape its persistent interest in the representation of individual development within a changing social world. When Mikhail Bakhtin turned to the Bildungsroman in the 1930s, he made the genre's relationship to literary realism central to this concern, seeing the portrayal of growth as inseparable from the development of narrative realism, with its particular understanding of the temporal and spatial qualities of both lived and literary experience. The Bildungsroman remains a privileged site for investigating realism's broader ambition to represent any world in the process of historical and social change.

In the resurgence of attention to the Bildungsroman since the late 1980s, critical emphasis has landed particularly on the genre’s unique affordances for foregrounding social and historical tensions, political values, and fundamental characteristics of modernity. We might think of Franco Moretti on the novel of development as a field for litigating the effects of revolution; Susan Fraiman on its capacity to stage problems of gender; Nancy Armstrong on its figuration of a kind of subject; Joseph Slaughter on its ability to imagine a subject specifically susceptible to emerging ideas of innate rights; Tobias Boes on the links between nation and Bildung; or Jed Esty on the breakdown of the genre’s traditional qualities in the age of decolonization and modernism.

Rather than focus primarily on the specific social and political tensions or values in which the Bildungsroman has been understood to interest itself, this panel hopes to return to the question of the paired development of the novel of development and the idea of literary realism. We might engage how the Bildungsroman’s investment in individual formation intersects, in and after the age of the realist and naturalist novel, with the epistemological commitments and assumptions of realistic representation. We might ask how and why narratives of development seemed (and in many ways still seem) to feel so at home in this aesthetic mode. We might consider how  the processes of Bildung and mimesis illuminate one another, or even how they provide productive tensions and contrasts. Is there more to the emergence of a particular conception of subjectivity and that of a particular conception of realistic narrative than mere historical coincidence and simultaneity? 

We welcome proposals that explore any aspect of narratives of development in relation to notions of realistic representation, regardless of period or region.