Bildungsroman : term and theory / Fritz Martini -- The Bildungsroman for nonspecialists : an attempt at a clarification / Jeffrey L. Sammons -- Irony and the novel : reflections on the German Bildungsroman / Martin Swales -- The novel and the individual : the significance of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister in the debate about the Bildungsroman / Hartmut Steinecke -- The apprenticeship of the reader : the Bildungsroman of the "age of Goethe" / Dennis F. Mahoney -- Was Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre really supposed to be a Bildungsroman? / Thomas P. Saine -- The theatrical mission of the Lehrjahre / Jane K. Brown --Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, oder die Entsagenden (1821-1829) : from Bildungsroman to archival novel / Ehrhard Bahr.

Rewriting the social text : the female Bildungsroman in eighteenth-century England / Eve Tavor Bannet -- Bildung and the transformation of society : Jean Paul's Titan and Flegeljahre / Wulf Koepke -- The place of inheritance in the Bildungsroman : Agathon, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, and Der Nachsommer / Michael Minden -- Eichendorff's Ahnung und Gegenwart as a novel of religious development / Gerhart Hoffmeister --E.T.A. Hoffmann and the Bildungsroman / James McGlathery -- The blackening of the breast : the narrative of existential education and R.M. Rilke's The notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge / Walter H. Sokel --Educational experiment in Thomas Mann / Gerald Gillespie -- Hermann Hesse : Steppenwolf (1927) Egon Schwarz -- Doubts about despair : Christa Wolf's Kinheitsmuster / Michael Beddow.