Among the notable contributions that writers from German speaking countries have rendered to world literature the concept and creation of the Bildungsroman, the Novel of Development, 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 Tom Jones, 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 Bildungsroman 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. 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.

It is a common misunderstanding to situate the origin of the novel in early 18th-century English literature. For precisely the most accomplished and important representative thereof, Henry Fielding (1707-1754) with his

This book establishes a vector of methodology in the approach to a particular type of fictional discourse, namely the English Bildungsroman (the novel of identity formation). Its wide-ranging critical perspectives are also useful to anyone concerned with, first of all, European and English novelistic genres, but also to those interested in theoretical perspectives of modern fiction studies in general, as well as in certain aspects of Western literature as a developing tradition.

Schools and circles have been a major force in twentieth-century intellectual movements. They fostered circulation of ideas within and between disciplines, thus altering the shape of intellectual inquiry. This volume offers a new perspective on theoretical schools in the humanities, both as generators of conceptual knowledge and as cultural phenomena. The structuralist, semiotic, phenomenological, and hermeneutical schools and circles have had a deep impact on various disciplines ranging from literary studies to philosophy, historiography, and sociology. The volume focuses on a set of loosely interrelated groups, with a strong literary, linguistic, and semiotic component, but extends to the fields of philosophy and history—the interdisciplinary conjunctions arising from a sense of conceptual kinship. It includes chapters on unstudied or less studied groups, such as Tel Aviv School of poetics and semiotics or the research group Poetics and Hermeneutics. The volume presents a significant supplement to the standard historical accounts of literary, critical, and related theory in the twentieth century. It enhances and complicates our understanding of the twentieth-century intellectual and academic history by showing schools and circles in the state of germination, dialogue, controversy, or decline, in their respective historical and institutional settings, while reaching simultaneously beyond those dense settings to the new cultural and ideological situations of the twenty-first century.

In the decades after its publication, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship served as a touchstone for such major philosophical and literary figures as Schopenhauer, Schleiermacher, and Schlegel, and was widely understood to be one of the greatest novels of the German canon. But in the decades and centuries following, the attention it has received in both disciplines has diminished in comparison to either Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther or his Elective Affinities. This volume follows the impetus of its early respondents to examine deeply what exactly Goethe's long and complicated novel is doing, and how it engages with problems and themes of human life. An interdisciplinary group of eminent scholars grapple with the novel's engagement with central philosophical questions such as individuality, development, and authority; aesthetic formation and narrative (and human) contingency; and gender, sexuality, and marriage. That these questions and their working-through in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre are in tension with one another speaks ultimately to how literature explores philosophical questions in ways that are open-ended, creative, and contain potential for new and different solutions to living with them. This unique philosophical approach to the form and purpose of a literary masterpiece illuminates new inroads into a novel at once famously complex and influential, and into the projects of one Germany's greatest writers.