In his study, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, literary theorist Franco Moretti argues that

Similarly, the post-1989 Polish appropriations of the classic genre of the developmental novel promoted a new type of culture that breaks with the oppressive patriarchy and embraces a social order in which the young intuitively guide the elders in building an engaged, open-minded, and supportive community. The truth of the matter is that only a few visionary female authors of post-1989 initiation novels allude to the specific types of changes that are to take place in the new Poland. The majority of the male writers under discussion only register the expiration of the old model. This gendered division in the appropriation of the classic genre is not surprising, given that women in Poland have been attached to the domestic sphere for centuries and only after the fall of communism had the opportunity to negotiate their social position for the first time. The gendered variations of the Bildungsroman are not exclusively Polish characteristics; they are a universal feature of the post-Enlightenment development of the genre. But before I turn to the most recent appropriations of the coming-of-age novel, I will briefly discuss its beginnings.

The Invariant

The Bildungsroman was born in late eighteenth-century Germany at the time of the Enlightenment and its humanistic ideal of “the whole man unfolding organically in all his complexity and richness.”