Female Maturity from Jane Austen to Margaret Atwood: When Bildungsroman Meets Zeitgeist (English Edition)

This book proposes a relationship between the novel that explores the heroine's maturity (bildungsroman) and the spirit of her age (zeitgeist). Put another way, how an author of bildungsroman defines and measures maturity, and the process through which her heroine matures, changes between the neoclassical, romantic, realist, naturalist, modernist, and postmodernist periods, and continues to change in the post-postmodernist period. In demonstrating this proposal, Michael Giffin considers the trajectory bildungsroman has made during the 19th and 20th century, with reference to Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility", Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre", George Eliot's "Middlemarch", Henry Handel Richardson's "The Getting of Wisdom", Iris Murdoch's "The Bell", Muriel Spark's "Robinson", and Margaret Atwood's "Alias Grace" (30,000 words).