“A masterful, revisionary study of an important genre’s transformation that is also a study of literary modernism’s emergence and character. . . . Anyone who writes in the future about the Bildungsroman of the long twentieth century will have to take Castle’s detailed readings and his theoretically inflected argument into account.”—James Joyce Quarterly
“Castle teases out some of the differences between English and Irish forms of the Bildungsroman, and he also explores the reconception of Bildung for women in the fiction of the modernist period.”—Comparative Literature Studies
“Succeeds in reconsidering key modernist texts as complex representations of the Bildung process.”—English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920
“Argues . . . that early modernist novels such as Jude the Obscure belong to the longer history of Bildung even if they apparently reject its nineteenth-century employment.”—Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900
“Offers an informed and nuanced perspective.”—James Joyce Literary Supplement
“[An] intelligent, persuasive book. . . . Highly recommended.”—CHOICE
