The Way of the World

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.<i>The Way of the World</i> with its unique combination of narrative theory and social history interprets the <i>Bildungsroman</i> as the great cultural mediator of nineteenth-century Europe: a form which explores the many strange compromises between revolution and restoration economic take-off and aesthetic pleasure individual autonomy and social normality. This new edition includes an additional final chapter on the collapse of the <i>Bildungsroman</i> in the years around the First World War (a crisis which opened the way for modernist experiments) and a new preface in which the author looks back at <i>The Way of the World</i> in the light of his more recent work.