Challenging the Coming-Of-Age: Similitudes and Divergences of Contemporary Female Bildungsroman with Traditional Instances

Abstract

The Bildungsroman is a literary genre that embraces those narratives dealing with the process of formation and self-development of its protagonist, narrating his or her journey from childhood to adulthood. The Bildungsroman, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, has been evolving and adjusting itself to new historical, social and literary contexts. Thus, a comparative analysis of two innovative female Bildungsroman (Persepolis and The House on Mango Street) will be carried out in order to analyse the manners in which the genre has evolved since its origins, studying their similitudes and the challenges for genre-tradition that divergences might occasion. The findings obtained from the analyses prove that contemporary women-centred and produced Bildungsromane, such as Persepolis and The House on Mango Street, a) distance themselves from some traditional notions and b) apply an unprecedented perspective to the coinciding traditional features inside the genre of the Bildungsroman.