
This paper will explore the rise of the Bildungsroman from its emergence as a major European Romantic art form into its enduring afterlife in the twentieth century realist novel. I will suggest that the primacy of the journey out into the world as a means of narrating self-development in the Bildungsroman was challenged by other genres of fiction that resisted the idea that the privilege of mobility was necessary to underpin the growth of free aesthetic subjects. Drawing on examples from the traditions of nineteenth-century provincial fiction – smaller stories of village and town life and the work of George Eliot in particular – the paper will explore how a counter-narrative of valuing the aesthetic experience of the un-journeyed emerges and remains a key feature of realist fiction in the present, especially as it has developed in the US tradition of ‘dirty realism’.
Professor Ruth Livesey
Ruth Livesey is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Associate Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Research and Innovation at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she leads research strategy and academic knowledge exchange for the University. She was Head of the Department of English and Deputy Dean of Humanities 2020-2023 and will be Belcher Visiting Fellow in Nineteenth-Century Literature at St Hugh’s College Oxford in 2024. Livesey is a member of the UK Research and Innovation Talent College and is a panel chair of the national Future Leaders Fellowship scheme. Her publications include the books Writing the Stagecoach Nation: Locality on the Move in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Oxford University Press, 2016), Socialism, Sex and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880-1914 (Oxford University Press, 2007) and the edited collection The American Experiment and the Idea of Democracy in British Culture, 1776-1914 (Ashgate, 2013). Livesey is currently completing a book entitled Provincial Fiction: Writing England and its Others, 1830-1950 which was funded by a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship in 2019-20.
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