This book explores the ways in which a range of recent American novelists havehandled the genre of the comingofage novel or the Bildungsroman. Novels ofthis gen... » 

This book explores the ways in which a range of recent American novelists havehandled the genre of the comingofage novel or the Bildungsroman. Novels ofthis genre characteristically dramatise the vicissitudes of growing up and thetrials and tribulations of young adulthood often presented through depictionsof immediate family relationships and other social structures.This book considers a variety of different American cultures in terms of raceclass and gender and a range of contemporary comingofage novels so thataesthetic judgements about the fiction might be made in the context of thesocial history that fiction represents.A series of questions are askedDoes the comingofage moment in these novels coincide with an interpretationof the fall of America?What kind of national commentary does it therefore facilitate?Is the bildungsroman a quintessentially American genre?What can it usefully tell us about contemporary American culture?Although the focus is on the contemporary period this is placed in the contextof reference to earlier novels and criticism of the genre as well ashistorical changes in the status of the family and the adolescent within it.FeaturesProvides detailed interpretations of 12 key contemporary novels from authorsincluding Purple America by Rick Moody The Age of Consent by Geoffrey WolffThe Virgin Suicides by Jefffrey Eugenides and Prozac Nation by ElizabethWurtzel.Explains the importance of the comingofage genre to the broader Americanliterature canon.Makes a significant intervention in contemporary debate about what is mostvaluable in recent American fiction. «