Fielding Wieland Goethe and the Rise of the Novel

Among the notable contributions that writers from German speaking countries have rendered to world literature the concept and creation of the <I>Bildungsroman,</I> the <I>Novel of Development</I>, ranks high. The narrative of a young man’s or woman’s slow and often circuitous path to his or her personal destiny and societal role found numerous imitators. They obviously answered a need in modernity, when the unique individuality of all men and women were being recognized and respected. The English novel of the eighteenth century, and in particular Fielding with his <I>Tom Jones</I>, during a time of the rising bourgeoisie, provided Wieland, Goethe and other German writers with important building blocks which they, in turn, reshaped and varied, as the modern <I>Bildungsroman</I> was being born. Years later it would return to England, so that another scholar could coin the phrase of «Wilhelm Meister and his English kinsmen».<BR> In tracing one aspect of the inter-relatedness of world cultures and literature, the book which – in its original form – was presented as the author’s Ph.D. thesis at Columbia University in 1953, makes its delayed but very timely contribution to the concept of cultural globalisation.