Bildungsroman Explained

In literary criticism, a Bildungsroman (pronounced as /de/, plural Bildungsromane, pronounced as /de/) is a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood (coming of age), in which character change is important.^[1] The term comes from the German words ("education", alternatively "forming") and ("novel").

Origin

The term was coined in 1819 by philologist Johann Karl Simon Morgenstern in his university lectures, and was later famously reprised by Wilhelm Dilthey, who legitimized it in 1870 and popularized it in 1905. The genre is further characterized by a number of formal, topical, and thematic features.^[2] The term coming-of-age novel is sometimes used interchangeably with bildungsroman, but its use is usually wider and less technical.

The birth of the bildungsroman is normally dated to the publication of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1795–96, or, sometimes, to Christoph Martin Wieland's of 1767.^[3] Although the bildungsroman arose in Germany, it has had extensive influence first in Europe and later throughout the world. Thomas Carlyle's English translation of Goethe's novel (1824) and his own Sartor Resartus (1833–34), the first English bildungsroman, inspired many British novelists.^{[4] [5] [6]} In the 20th century, it spread to France^{[7] [8]} and several other countries around the globe.^[9]

Barbara Whitman noted that the Iliad might be the first Bildungsroman. It is not just "the story of the Trojan War. The Trojan War is in effect the backdrop for the story of Achilles' development. At the beginning Achilles is still a rash youth, making rash decisions which cost dearly to himself and all around him. (...) The story reaches its conclusion when Achilles has reached maturity and allows King Priam to recover Hector's body".^[10]

The genre translates fairly directly into the cinematic form, the coming-of-age film.

Plot outline

A bildungsroman is a growing up or "coming of age" of a generally naive person who goes in search of answers to life's questions with the expectation that these will result in gaining experience of the world. The genre evolved from folklore tales of a dunce or youngest child going out in the world to seek their fortune.^[11] Usually in the beginning of the story, there is an emotional loss which makes the protagonist leave on their journey. In a bildungsroman, the goal is maturity, and the protagonist achieves it gradually and with difficulty. The genre often features a main conflict between the main character and society. Typically, the values of society are gradually accepted by the protagonist and they are ultimately accepted into society—the protagonist's mistakes and disappointments are over. In some works, the protagonist is able to reach out and help others after having achieved maturity.

Franco Moretti "argues that the main conflict in the Bildungsroman is the myth of modernity with its overvaluation of youth and progress as it clashes with the static teleological vision of happiness and reconciliation found in the endings of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister and even Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice".^[12]

There are many variations and subgenres of bildungsroman that focus on the growth of an individual. An Entwicklungsroman ("development novel") is a story of general growth rather than self-cultivation. An Erziehungsroman ("education novel") focuses on training and formal schooling,^[13] while a Künstlerroman ("artist novel") is about the development of an artist and shows a growth of the self.^[14] Furthermore, some memoirs and published journals can be regarded as bildungsroman although claiming to be predominantly factual (e.g. The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac or The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto "Che" Guevara).^[15] The term is also more loosely used to describe coming-of-age films and related works in other genres.

Examples

Precursors

• , by Ibn Tufail (12th century)^[16]
• (first edition 1554)^[17]
• by Baltasar Gracián (first edition 1651). Usually considered the pioneering work in its modern form.

18th century

• Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill), by John Cleland (1748)^{[18] [19]}
• The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, by Henry Fielding (1749)
• Candide, by Voltaire (1759)^[20]
• The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne (1759)^[21]
• , by Christoph Martin Wieland (1767)—often considered the first "true" bildungsroman
• Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship by Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1795–96)^[22]

19th century

• The Betrothed, by Alessandro Manzoni (1827)^[23]
• The Red and the Black, by Stendhal (1830)
• Sartor Resartus, by Thomas Carlyle (1833–34)^[6]
• Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë (1847)^[24]
• Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë (1847)^[25]
• , by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1849)^[26]
• David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens (1850)
• Green Henry, by Gottfried Keller (1855)^[27]
• The Morgesons, by Elizabeth Stoddard (1862)
• Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens (1861)^[28]
• Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott (1869)^[29]
• Sentimental Education, by Gustave Flaubert (1869)
• The Adolescent, by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1875)^[30]
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (1884)
• What Maisie Knew, by Henry James (1897)^[31]

20th century

• Kim, by Rudyard Kipling (1901)^[32]
• Beneath the Wheel, by Hermann Hesse, 1906
• Martin Eden, by Jack London (1909)^[33]
• The Book of Khalid, by Ameen Rihani (1911)^[34]
• Sons and Lovers, by D. H. Lawrence (1913)^[35]
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce (1916)^[14]
• Demian, by Hermann Hesse (1919)^[36]
• This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1920)^[37]
• The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann (1924)
• , by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay (1929)^[38]
• Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)^[39]
• The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger (1951)^[40]
• Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, (1952)
• Children of Violence, by Doris Lessing (1952–1969)^[41]
• In the Castle of My Skin, by George Lamming (1953)^[42]
• A Separate Peace, by John Knowles (1956)
• Goodbye, Columbus, by Philip Roth (1959)^[43]
• To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee (1960)
• Wake in Fright, by Kenneth Cook (1961)^[44]
• The Emperor of Ice-Cream, by Brian Moore (1965)^[45]
• Dune, by Frank Herbert (1965)^[46]
• The Outsiders, by S. E. Hinton (1967)^[47]
• A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin (1968)^[48]
• Bright Lights, Big City, by Jay McInerney (1984)^[49]
• How to Kill a Bull, by Anna-Leena Härkönen (1984)^[50]
• Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card (1985)^[47]
• Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson (1985)^[51]
• Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami (1987)^[52]
• English Music, by Peter Ackroyd (1992)^[53]
• Harry Potter, by J. K. Rowling (1997)^[54]
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky (1999)^[55]
• Naruto, by Masashi Kishimoto (1999)^[56]
• Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi (2000)^[57]

21st century

• The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd (2002)^[58]
• The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini (2003)^[59]
• The Fortress of Solitude, by Jonathan Lethem (2003)^[60]
• Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)^[40]
• Indecision, by Benjamin Kunkel (2005)^[61]
• Black Swan Green, by David Mitchell (2006)^[62]
• Indignation, by Philip Roth (2008)
• Sputnik Caledonia, by Andrew Crumey (2008)^[63]
• Neapolitan Novels, by Elena Ferrante (2011–2014)^[64]
• Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan (2018)^[65]
• Boy Swallows Universe, by Trent Dalton (2018)^[66]

See also

• Bildung
• Künstlerroman
• Mirrors for princes
• Roman à clef

Bibliography

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Further reading

• Book: Abrams, M. H. . Glossary of Literary Terms . M. H. Abrams . 8th . 2005 . Thomson Wadsworth . Boston . 1-4130-0218-8.
• Book: Madden. David. David Madden (novelist). A Primer of the Novel: For Readers and Writers. 1980. Scarecrow Press. Metuchen, NJ. 978-0810812659. 18–19. Bildungsroman.
  Revised edition, with bibliographic updates by Charles Bane and Sean M. Flory (Scarecrow Press, 2006).
• Book: Slaughter. Joseph R.. Logan. Peter Melville. The Encyclopedia of the Novel. 2011. Wiley-Blackwell. Oxford; Malden, MA. 978-1-4051-6184-8. 1. 93–97. Bildungsroman/Künstlerroman.

External links

• The Bildungsroman Project - academic digital humanities project featuring user-submitted articles on genre exemplars and contemporary personal narratives, edited by English literature professor Katherine Carlson

Notes and References

1. Encyclopedia: Bildungsroman: German literary genre . Encyclopædia Britannica . 22 April 2013 . https://web.archive.org/web/20200328005020/https://global.britannica.com/art/bildungsroman . 28 March 2020.
2. Iversen . Annikin Teines . 2010 . Change and Continuity; The bildungsroman in English . University of Tromsø . PhD . Munin open research archive . 10037/2486.
3. Swales, Martin. The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. 38.
4. Buckley, J. H. (1974). Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding, Harvard Univ Press, .
5. Ellis, L. (1999). Appearing to Diminish: Female Development and the British Bildungsroman, 1750–1850, London: Bucknell University Press,
6. Golban . Petru . December 2013 . Tailoring the Bildungsroman within a Philosophical Treatise: Sartor Resartus and the Origins of the English Novel of Formation . Journal of Faculty of Letters . 30 . 2 . 10 August 2022 . 26 April 2023 . https://web.archive.org/web/20230426100654/https://www.academia.edu/16687090 . live .
7. Moretti, Franco, and Albert Sbragia (1987), The Way of the World: the Bildungsroman in European Culture, London: Verso, .
8. Hirsch, Marianne. "The Novel of Formation as Genre: Between Great Expectations and Lost Illusions", Genre Vol. 12 (Fall 1979), pp. 293–311, University of Oklahoma.
9. Slaughter, J. R. (2006). "Novel Subjects and Enabling Fictions: the Formal Articulation of International Human Rights Law", Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law, Ch. 2 (2007), New York: Fordham University Press, ; .
10. Whitman, Barbara C. "The Iliad as a Bildungsroman". In Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Roundtable on Classical Greece (eds. Victor Kromberg and Amalia Stanton, pp. 71, 73.
11. "Franco Moretti et John Neubauer, historiens de la littérature, ont tous deux insisté sur le rôle fondamental qu'a joué le roman, depuis la fin du XVIIIe siècle jusqu'à la Première Guerre mondiale, dans la construction des âges de la vie, de l'adolescence et la jeunesse. Si, avant cette période, les jeunes sont les laissés-pour-compte de la littérature romanesque, cette entrée tardive est compensée par la place centrale qu'ils occupent dans le roman de formation. Vers la fin du XIXe siècle, quand ce genre entre en crise, les jeunes sont remplacés par les adolescents, nouveaux protagonistes des œuvres de fiction. Après les écrits de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, le roman de formation, ou Bildungsroman, dont l'apogée se situe entre Les années d'apprentissage de Wilhelm Meister de Goethe (1795–1796) et l'Éducation sentimentale de Flaubert (1869), invente la figure littéraire du jeune homme voyageur. C'est à partir donc de cette période qu'il faudra retrouver certains traits des voyages fictionnels, que j'appelle matrices , qui hantent encore notre imaginaire, et que l'on retrouve dans les séjours Erasmus contemporains" (Cicchelli Vincenzo, "Les legs du voyage de formation à la Bildung cosmopolite", Le Télémaque, 2010/2 (n° 38), pp. 57–70. DOI: 10.3917/tele.038.0057.
12. Lazzaro-Weis, Carol. "The Female 'Bildungsroman': Calling It into Question", NWSA Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Winter, 1990), pp. 16–34.
13. Malone, David H. Faculty Development, or Faculty Life as a "Bildungsroman", Profession (1979), pp. 46–50.
14. Book: Werlock, James P. . 2010 . The Facts on File companion to the American short story . 2 . 387. Infobase . 9781438127439.
15. "The Motorcycle Diaries by Che Guevara–HSC English Discovery ", Real Teacher Tutors. Retrieved 12 July 2016.
16. Book: Fifty major thinkers on education: from Confucius to Dewey . Palmer, Joy . Liora Bresler . David Edward Cooper . Routledge Key Guides . 2001 . 0-415-23126-4 . 34 .
17. Web site: El lazarillo de Tormes . https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221009/http://www.educacion.gob.es/exterior/centros/burdeos/es/materialesclase/lazarillotormes.pdf . 2022-10-09 . dead . 2004 . Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte (Spain). 1 . es . 24 November 2013.
18. Hanlon. Aaron. Fanny Hill and the Legibility of Consent. ELH. 2019. 86. 4. 941–966. 10.1353/elh.2019.0035. 213479222. 11 December 2020. 23 January 2022. https://web.archive.org/web/20220123150731/https://muse.jhu.edu/article/742609. live.
19. McCracken. David. A Burkean Analysis of the Sublimity and the Beauty of the Phallus in John Cleland's Fanny Hill . ANQ . 2016 . 29. 3. 138–141 . 10.1080/0895769X.2016.1216388. 164429385.
20. Book: Feder, Helena . Ecocriticism and the Idea of Culture: Biology and the Bildungsroman . 2014 . Routledge . 9781315578644. 30 . Candide exhibits several of the traits of the "traditional" or Germanic Bildungsroman, particularly the depiction of the development of an individual through travel. As a catalogue of the horrors of the modern world, Candide — perhaps more than any of the other texts examined in this book—lives up to Moretti's articulation of the Bildungsroman as the "'symbolic form' of modernity" (5). Read from an ecocultural perspective, this philosophical Bildungsroman suggests the limitations of Dialectic 's conceptions of the Enlightenment and the subject with a model, albeit a modest one, for interaction with the world outside of rationalism's logic of domination..
21. Book: McWilliams, Ellen . Margaret Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman . 2009 . Ashgate Publishing . 978-0-7546-6027-9 . 14 . The two early English Bildungsromane already mentioned, Tom Jones and The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, are examples of coming-of-age narratives that predate the generic expectations of the German tradition..
22. Web site: Wrong Move: Utter Detachment, Utter Truth . Robison, James . James Robison (author) . 1 June 2016 . 9 June 2016 . . 24 June 2016 . https://web.archive.org/web/20160624150753/https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4087-wrong-move-utter-detachment-utter-truth . live .
23. Dagradi . Sergio . Il Bildungsroman di Renzo: Una Nota Sui "Promessi Sposi" . Italianistica: Rivista di letteratura italiana . 1999 . 28 . 3: September/December 1999 . 421–425 . 23937196 . 15 November 2022 . 15 November 2022 . https://web.archive.org/web/20221115194509/https://www.jstor.org/stable/23937196 . live .
24. Web site: Jane Eyre: A Bildungsroman . Cortney . Lollar . 1996 . The Victorian Web . 8 March 2013 . 10 November 2013 . https://web.archive.org/web/20131110233653/http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/bronte/cbronte/bildungs.html . live .
25. Book: Victorian Fiction as a Bildungsroman: Its Flourishing and Complexity. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2019. 9781527540798.
26. Book: Frank. Joseph. Dostoevsky His Life and Work. limited. 2010. Princeton University Press. New Jersey. 114. 9780691128191.
27. Web site: The Bildungsroman in Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism . Enotes.com . 21 April 2011 . 10 May 2011 . https://web.archive.org/web/20110510154338/http://www.enotes.com/nineteenth-century-criticism/bildungsroman-nineteenth-century-literature . live .
28. Taft. Matthew. The work of love: Great Expectations and the English Bildungsroman . Textual Practice . 2020 . 34. 12. 1969–1988 . 10.1080/0950236X.2020.1834700. 227034524.
29. Trumpener. Katie. Actors, puppets, Girls: Little Women and the collective Bildungsroman . Textual Practice . 2020 . 34. 12. 1911–1931 . 10.1080/0950236X.2020.1834709. 227033016.
30. Web site: Knapp . Liza . Dostoevsky and the Novel of Adultery: The Adolescent . https://web.archive.org/web/20210709185159/https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/235190399.pdf . 2021-07-09 . live . 21 October 2022 . Core.
31. Encyclopedia: Formalism and the Novel: Henry James . Martin Coyle . Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism . New York . Routledge Florence . 1990 . 593 . etal.
32. Esty, Jed . Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development . Oxford Scholarship Online . Oxford University Press . Oxford, UK . 2012 . 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195305746.013.0030 . 978-0-19-985797-5 . 18 March 2023 . 13 May 2023 . https://web.archive.org/web/20230513065721/https://books.google.com/books?id=yeFoAgAAQBAJ . live.
33. Web site: Martin Eden Summary – Jack London – Masterplots II: American Fiction Series, Revised Edition . Enotes.com . 21 April 2011 . 3 October 2012 . https://web.archive.org/web/20121003185134/http://www.enotes.com/martin-eden-salem/martin-eden-11000305 . live.
34. Nash, Geoffrey . Ameen Rihani's The Book of Khalid and the Voice of Thomas Carlyle . New Comparison Journal . 17 . The British Comparative Literature Association, University of Essex . Colchester, UK . 1994.
35. Web site: Sons and Lovers Lawrence's novel as a Bildungsroman . Enotes.com . 21 April 2011 . 27 July 2010 . https://web.archive.org/web/20100727000916/http://www.enotes.com/sons-lovers/lawrences-novel-bildungsroman . live .
36. Web site: Demian - Oxford Reference. 28 October 2021. 28 October 2021. https://web.archive.org/web/20211028184949/https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095709588. live.
37. Book: Hendriksen, Jack . This side of paradise as a Bildungsroman . 1993 . P. Lang . 0-8204-1852-8.
38. Book: Mukherjee . Meenakshi . 1985 . Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India . Oxford University Press . 0-19-561648-0 . 128 .
39. Tredell . Nicolas . 1 July 2017 . Minglings: Form, Style, and Theme in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. . PDF . Critical Approaches to Literature . 92–106 . In her introduction to the 1986 Virago edition, Holly Eley calls it “primarily a love story” and also “an account of a strong, intelligent (though uneducated) woman’s steps towards self-fulfilment” (Hurston vii). In generic terms, this latter definition would make Hurston’s novel a Bildungsroman, a story of (self-)education by life. . The Wikipedia Library.
40. Web site: The Top 13 Coming-of-Age Novels . The Top 13 . 9 December 2009 . 21 April 2011 . https://web.archive.org/web/20101225085020/http://thetop13.com/coming-of-age-novels-L45/ . 25 December 2010 . dead.
41. Web site: The Nobel Prize in Literature 2007 – Bio-bibliography. www.nobelprize.org. 19 March 2018. 24 February 2016. https://web.archive.org/web/20160224234101/http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2007/bio-bibl.html. live.
42. https://www.britannica.com/biography/George-Lamming#ref669217 "George Lamming, West Indian author"
43. Book: Kercheval, Jesse Lee . Building Fiction . The Story Press . 101 . Continuing Conflict . 1997 . 1-884910-28-9 . registration . https://archive.org/details/buildingfictionh0000kerc/page/101.
44. Book: Peters-Little . Frances . Curthoys . Ann . Docker . John . Passionate Histories: Myth, Memory and Indigenous Australia . ANU E Press . 62 . Epistemological vertigo and allegory . September 2010 . 9781921666650 . https://books.google.com/books?id=EJMwU1kqo7sC&pg=PA62 . 18 March 2023 . 26 April 2023 . https://web.archive.org/web/20230426102151/https://books.google.com/books?id=EJMwU1kqo7sC&pg=PA62 . live .
45. Hicks, Patrick . Patrick Hicks . History and Masculinity in Brian Moore's 'The Emperor of Ice-Cream'. The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies. 25. 1/2 . July–December 1999. 400–413. 10.2307/25515283. 25515283.
46. McGregor. Gaile. The Technomyth in Transition: Reading American Popular Culture. Journal of American Studies. 1987. 21. 3. 387–409. 10.1017/S0021875800022891. 145732487. 12 April 2012. 17 April 2013. https://web.archive.org/web/20130417180715/http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/t_echmyth.html. live.
47. Web site: Melanie Kinchen. Bildungsroman Novels for Young Adults. 13 July 2006. etal. 12 April 2012. https://web.archive.org/web/20120428031138/http://www.lsu.edu/faculty/jpullia/3223bildungsroman.htm. 28 April 2012. dead.
48. Ursula LeGuin's Magical World of Earthsea . The ALAN Review . 23 . 3 . 10 June 2013 . Griffin . Jan M. . 16 April 2011 . https://web.archive.org/web/20110416041245/http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/spring96/griffin.html . live .
49. Web site: The Good Life . Jay McInerney . transcript of podcast . 3 January 2013 . 8 February 2013 . https://web.archive.org/web/20130208035442/http://www.randomhouse.com/kvpa/mcinerney/introduction_to_the_good_life_and_jays_tour.html . live .
50. Web site: Anna-Leena Härkönen oli teini kirjoittaessaan Häräntappoaseen, mutta onnistui silti kohauttamaan – seksikohtaukset saivat jopa oman mummon häpeämään. Anna-Leena Härkönen was a teenager when she wrote 'How to Kill a Bull', but she still managed to make people shock – the sex scenes even put her own grandmother to shame!. Eeva-Kaarina. Kolsi. Ilta-Sanomat. 29 June 2020. 29 February 2024. fi.
51. Web site: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: Context . Sparknotes . 27 August 1959 . 21 April 2011. https://web.archive.org/web/20110503021102/http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/oranges/context.html . 3 May 2011 . live.
52. Web site: Norwegian Wood: On Having a Girl, and Losing Her . Alyssa . Rosenberg . 30 July 2010 . . 5 March 2017 . 13 June 2017 . https://web.archive.org/web/20170613193539/https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2010/07/norwegian-wood-on-having-a-girl-and-losing-her/60340/ . live .
53. Book: Lewis, Barry . My Words Echo Thus: Possessing the Past in Peter Ackroyd . 978-1570036682 . . 2007.
54. Web site: Bildungsroman Novels: Definition and Examples . 22 January 2021 .
55. Web site: An Interview with Stephen Chbosky . Word Riot . 27 May 2012 . Marty Beckerman . https://web.archive.org/web/20050113162049/http://wordriot.org/template.php?ID=552 . 13 January 2005 . dead.
56. Web site: Naruto is the quintessential Bildungsroman. 2 February 2018. The Lawrentian. 7 June 2020. 8 June 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20200608014125/https://www.lawrentian.com/archives/1011992. live.
57. Web site: Reading Persepolis: Defining and Redefining Culture, Gender and Genre . John Bartram High School . Tara Ann Carter . 6 October 2013 . https://web.archive.org/web/20180128034643/http://www.tip.sas.upenn.edu/curriculum/units/2011/04/11.04.02.pdf . 28 January 2018 . dead . 6 October 2013.
58. Web site: Secret Life of Bees-Character Analysis . 21 April 2011 . https://web.archive.org/web/20110503023152/http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/secretbees/canalysis.html. 3 May 2011 . live.
59. Web site: Khaled Hosseini . Katherine C. (Berwyn, PA)'s review of The Kite Runner . Goodreads.com . 4 March 1965 . 21 April 2011 . 6 November 2012 . https://web.archive.org/web/20121106102123/http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/35890028 . live .
60. News: The dreamer of Brooklyn. 12 September 2003. Salon. 19 March 2018. en-US. Peter. Kurth. 20 March 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20180320105503/https://www.salon.com/2003/09/12/lethem_8/. live.
61. News: Indecision: Getting It Together . . Jay . Mcinerney . 28 August 2005 . 18 February 2017 . 2 April 2015 . https://web.archive.org/web/20150402183308/http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/books/review/28MCINER.html . live .
62. News: Wonder Year (Black Swan Green by David Mitchell) . . 16 April 2006 . 18 February 2017 . 2 February 2017 . https://web.archive.org/web/20170202211159/http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/books/review/16freudenberger.html . live .
63. Web site: David Goldie, "Modern Scottish Fiction: Telling Stories in Order to Live". See also The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction Since 1945 . 55 . 27 March 2023 . 27 March 2023 . https://web.archive.org/web/20230327164356/https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/47320/8/Goldie_CCBF_2015_Modern_Scottish_Fiction_Telling_Stories.pdf . live .
64. Web site: The Neapolitan Novels Boxed Set - Elena Ferrante . 15 January 2024 .
65. News: Washington Black is a slave story told with a fresh sense of urgency. The National. Lucy. Sholes. 18 August 2018. 9 October 2018. 9 October 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20181009211142/https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/book-review-washington-black-is-a-slave-story-told-with-a-fresh-sense-of-urgency-1.761087. live.
66. News: Boy Swallows Universe review: Netflix's adaptation is incredible. 11 January 2024. 9 January 2024. subscription. Kylie Northover.