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Author Boes, Tobias, 1976- author.

Title Formative fictions : nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and the Bildungsroman / Tobias Boes
Published Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, 2012
Cornell University Library, 2012

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Description 1 online resource
Series Signale : modern German letters, cultures, and thought
Signale (Ithaca, N.Y.)
Contents The limits of national form : normativity and performativity in Bildungsroman criticism -- Apprenticeship of the novel : Goethe and the invention of history -- Epigonal consciousness : Stendhal, Immermann, and the "problem of generations" around 1830 -- Long-distance fantasies : Freytag, Eliot, and national literature in the age of empire -- Urban vernaculars : Joyce, Döblin, and the "individuating rhythm" of modernity -- Conclusion : apocalipsis cum figuris : Thomas Mann and the Bildungsroman at the ends of time
Summary The "Bildungsroman", or "novel of formation, " has long led a paradoxical life within literary studies, having been construed both as a peculiarly German genre, a marker of that country's cultural difference from Western Europe, and as a universal expression of modernity. In 'Formative Fictions', Tobias Boes argues that the dual status of the Bildungsroman renders this novelistic form an elegant way to negotiate the diverging critical discourses surrounding national and world literature. Since the late eighteenth century, authors have employed the story of a protagonist's journey into maturity as a powerful tool with which to facilitate the creation of national communities among their readers. Such attempts always stumble over what Boes calls "cosmopolitan remainders, " identity claims that resist nationalism's aim for closure in the normative regime of the nation-state. These cosmopolitan remainders are responsible for the curiously hesitant endings of so many novels of formation
Analysis Literature: history & criticism
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes In English
Print version record and CIP data provided by publisher
SUBJECT Europa gnd
Subject Bildungsromans -- History and criticism.
German fiction -- History and criticism
European fiction -- History and criticism
Nationalism and literature.
City and town life in literature.
Comparative literature -- German and European
Comparative literature -- European and German
LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- German.
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY -- Literary.
City and town life in literature
Bildungsromans
European fiction
German fiction
Nationalism and literature
Bildungsroman
Genre/Form Electronic books
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2019724683
ISBN 9780801465215
0801465214
9780801465659
0801465656
0801451779
9780801451775