Growing up: Sentimental Educations

The Romantic movement lent new authority to personal feeling (then often referred to as 'Sentiment') as the most powerful way to apprehend truth. By 1900 childhood and adolescence had become accepted as separable stages of life through which one grew to adulthood. Accordingly, the nineteenth century witnessed the flourishing of an international fictional tradition, later called the Bildungsroman, or "novel of education" that focused upon a single individual in an increasingly urban world. We will study portrayals of 'growing up' in major, influential novels by Goethe, Balzac, Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, Flaubert (a novel titled Sentimental Education). Turgenev, Henry James and James Joyce. 3 Hrs. Lect/Disc