Novel Affinities

Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge

"The novel, according to standard scholarly narratives, depicts an individual's path to maturity. Scholarship on the rise of the novel in Germany and in Europe has essentially collapsed the genre into the individualist Bildungsroman, exemplified by an extremely narrow canon. This study challenges and nuances this narrative, first by expanding the focus from the individual to the family, second by broadening the field of novels under consideration to include not only canonical works but also so-called "trivial literature," and third by reading novels alongside contemporary biological, legal, and pedagogical texts"--