Bildungsroman is a novel that follows a young protagonist's psychological and moral growth into adulthood.
Bildungsroman — German for 'novel of formation' — was crystallised by Goethe's 'Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship' (1795–1796), where a young man abandons bourgeois trade for the theatre and slowly discovers his place in the world. The genre traces a hero from naive youth through mistakes, romance, and disillusionment to a hard-won maturity. Dickens's 'Great Expectations' (1861), Joyce's 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' (1916), and Salinger's 'The Catcher in the Rye' (1951) all carry its DNA. What unites them is structural: an inner clock measured not in plot but in self-understanding. Modern variants like Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels and Sally Rooney's 'Normal People' show the form remains the most flexible vessel literature has for the question of how a self is built.