Distinction Without a Difference: Friedrich von Blanckenburg's Versuch über den Roman , Karl Morgenstern's Bildungsroman , and Early English Theories of the Novel

Abstract In the roughly two hundred years since Karl Morgenstern invented the term and appended it to Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, the bildungsroman has captured the attention of some of the most influential scholars and critics of language and literature. A proper accounting of the broader significance of the discourse produced by these commentators would arguably require its own literary theory, but a simple keyword search through any academic database reveals a startling truth about its contemporary status: The word bildungsroman is today used freely by scholars across the academy to describe virtually any intellectual change over time, rendering it all but meaningless as a serious critical term. These broad usages overlook intellectual development as a distinct representational problem and instead assume that, like a simple adjective, the developmental process the bildungsroman supposedly describes remains categorically stable, universally meaningful, and unproblematically applicable to any critical object capable of reflecting change, irrespective of the language, culture, or period of that object's origin. Using texts by Fielding, Shaftesbury, William Craig, and others, this article argues that many of what are now considered the bildungsroman's most definitive characteristics are rooted in German and English exchanges of language that long precede Morgenstern. Close examination of these exchanges reveals that many of the features supposedly unique to Morgenstern's lectures on the bildungsroman were borrowed from Friedrich von Blanckenburg's Essay on the Novel, that many of the central ideas underwriting that essay are themselves borrowed from or shared by important English authors of the eighteenth century, and that Morgenstern's recapitulation of those ideas under the rubric of the bildungsroman takes what had been for earlier English authors the most important elements of art, literature, or the emerging novel and reframes them as the most important elements of a narrowly conceived subgenre of nationalistic German literary criticism that finds its clearest reflection in Wilhelm Meister. In so doing, he originates a series of interlocking oversimplifications concerning the categorical distinctions between the novel and the so-called bildungsroman that his German contemporaries, Wilhelm Dilthey, and countless subsequent critics have found tremendously seductive. These oversimplifications have occluded the fact that highly influential English authors were deeply involved with creating, representing, and advancing the same content so often attributed to the bildungsroman's supposedly unique, especially German brand of novels, raising fundamental questions about the form's generic legitimacy.