The Post-Bildungsroman: Coming of Age at the Margins

The Post-Bildungsroman: Coming of Age at the Margins

The Post-Bildungsroman reimagines the coming-of-age genre, exploring youth, identity, and belonging in narratives at the margins of comics, videogames, and experimental novels. Throughout this collection, contributors use the theoretical framework of the Bildungsroman to analyze youth development, identity-in-flux, decolonial logic, as well as negotiation of maturity and belonging in contemporary narratives at the margins of literature (sequential art, comics, videogames, experimental novels, etc.). This edited collection subverts colonial and narrow apologies of the Bildungsroman that claim it to be an exclusively European, enlightened sub-genre of the novel “Every so often, a scholarly work shatters tired and misaligned coordinates, forcing a radical recalibration of how we map the architecture of narrative worlds. The Post-Bildungsroman does exactly that. In Growing Up in the Gutter , Quintana-Vallejo cracked open the stale Euro-Enlightenment mold. Now, alongside a visionary crew of critical thinkers, he redraws the literary periodic table from the ground up. They don't just critique the Euro-bildungsroman-they alchemically conjure its transformation. They surface a long-buried element: the global, decolonial multiplicities of youth self-making pulsing through literature, comics, video games, multimediated narratives, and beyond. Brazen. Brilliant. Boundary-breaking!” ― Frederick Luis Aldama, Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, UT Austin, USA Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo is Assistant Professor of English at Rhode Island College.