The Way of the World The Bildungsroman in European Culture

Wilhelm Meister, Elizabeth Bennet, Julien Sorel, Rastignac, Jane Eyre, Bazaroz, Dorothea Brooke ... the Golden Age of the European novel discovers a new collective protagonist: youth. It is problematic and restless youth -- 'strange' characters, as their own creators often say -- arising from the downfall of traditional societies. But even more than that, youth is the symbolic figure for European modernity: that sudden mix of great expectations and lost illusions that the bourgeois world learns to 'read', and to accept, as if it were a novel.

Franco Moretti teaches English at Stanford, where he directs the Center for the Study of the Novel.