Bildungsroman

This book is a bildungsroman.

Tom is reading a Bildungsroman.

English speakers are more hospitable to fiction in translation, and yet when was the last time you heard someone mention “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship” or “Elective Affinities,” Goethe’s long fictions? These books have a good claim to have founded two of the major genres of the modern novel—respectively, the Bildungsroman and the novel of adultery.

Goethe's honorific assignment to the vanguard of a uniquely German novelistic tradition of the bildungsroman simultaneously places him outside the mainstream of the development of the novel.