While the Bildungsroman traditionally focuses on the self-education of a young male hero, feminist critics have been revising and expanding the definition of the genre since the 1970s, establishing the separate category of novels having a female protagonist. The female Bildungsroman is now recognised in its own right, although often under different names. While Esther Labovitz (1988) maintains the classical term, Abel, Hirsch and Langland prefer ‘fictions of female development’ (1983) and Susan Rosowski opts for ‘novel of awakening’ (1983).

Wanda Ramos's Percursos (do Luachimo ao Luena) [Travels (from the Luachimo to the Luena)] defies straightforward genre classification. Thematically the book is certainly a ‘fiction of female development’. It is also undoubtedly a retrospective narrative, with the ‘travels’ of the female protagonist being told from memory, more than twenty years after the childhood recaptured and about ten years after the last memories of adulthood recalled in the text. But Percursos could also be considered an autobiographical novel with a zero degree of authorial identification or an (unsigned) autobiography in the third person. The ambiguity derives from the text itself, from the narrator's choice of intertextual weavings.

The title, Percursos (routes, journeys, travels, trajectories, distances covered), and the specific geographical subtitle (the Luachimo river running north–south and the Luena flowing east–west in eastern Angola) appear to label the book as travel writing. In the end, the two rivers mark physical space as much as time periods: ‘the Luachimo is the river that flows through Dundo, the time-space of the [protagonist’s] childhood, the Luena is the river at Luso, the time-space of [her] adulthood’ (Morão, 1993: 171, my translation). These are also the only geographical boundaries the protagonist of Percursos claims to have internalised by touching them (‘palpá-los’), their waters still soaking her memory (‘Rios estes de áfrica que ainda lhe ensopam a memória’, 68). More importantly, the journey takes the protagonist from inner well-being as a child in Lunda to existential malaise as a young adult, a spiritual journey of ‘awakening’ that also includes Portugal. As the Bildungsroman, too, explores the journey motif (psychologically, from innocence to self-knowledge, but also physically, as each new environment adds to the educational process), the ambiguity of the ‘travels’ is already in the title, further complicating the question of genre classification. Abel, Hirsch and Langland highlight two fundamental differences when the concept Bildungsroman is applied to fictions of female development.