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The Irish Bildungsroman, Gregory Castle, Sarah L. Townsend, Matthew L. Reznicek (eds.)

Helen Penet
p. 168-170
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The Irish Bildungsroman, Gregory Castle, Sarah L. Townsend, Matthew L. Reznicek (eds.), Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 2025, 381 p.

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1Gregory Castle, Sarah L. Townsend and Matthew L. Reznicek treat us to a comprehensive 381-page exploration of the Bildungsroman in Ireland from the Act of Union to the early 21st century. The scope of the volume is ambitious, and this is translated by the impressive number and variety of texts and authors studied. The difficulty of producing a coherent volume is compounded by the elusiveness of the definition of the Bildungsroman, as well as the fact that Irish exemplars of the genre are, as Louis MacNeice put it, “incorrigibly plural” (p. 3). The editors and authors of this volume have more than risen to the challenge, such that while the individual chapters can be read as stand-alone pieces of work, the obvious synergies within each section and the book as a whole make for a compelling study of the Irish Bildungsroman.

2The book’s stated aim is to remove the study of the genre from the shadow of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) which has, for obvious reasons, coloured interpretations of the Irish Bildungsroman for decades. Just as the volume refuses to see Joyce’s text as either a part of the modernist tradition or an anti-colonial rejection of that tradition, the various texts studied here are seen as both embracing and challenging the conventions of the genre in different ways and at different times.

3The volume is divided into three sections, which are organised chronologically. Within each of these sections, individual chapters study the different approaches taken within the genre to reconcile the Enlightenment concept of Bildung to the lived realities of a colonial and postcolonial society.

4The first section covers the years from the Act of Union until the stirrings of revolutionary change that accompanied the Land Wars, and all four chapters explore the relationship between Bildung and the question of the nation. The Bildungsromane studied in Mary L. Mullen’s chapter allow for the personal development of the protagonist, but this growth is out of sync with the development of the nation in national-historical time. Christina Morin’s chapter on the Gothic Bildungsroman focuses on tales of female growth, and challenges the preconception that such tales superficially eschew a consideration of national affairs. Lindsay Janssen’s consideration of famine fiction reveals the famine as a disruption or at least a postponement of growth for both the individual and the nation, and suggests that the one is dependent on the other. This conclusion is reinforced in Heidi Hansson’s chapter on land war novels, where, once again, individual happiness is contingent on the happiness of the nation.

5The second section spans the years of transformation during which Ireland went from an aspiration to a reality. Irish writing evolved in parallel and the chapters in this section all deal with Irish Bildunsromane written in the form of mixed genre narratives. Elizabeth Grubgeld’s chapter explores the intersection of time and place, specifically the open landscape of the West of Ireland, and uses the bakhtinian concept of the “chronotope of the road” (p. 16) to represent the journey away from childhood. Julie Anne Stevens discusses the specificity of the visual artist’s apprenticeship narrative from a gendered perspective in the works of George Moore as well as in those of Edith Somerville and Martin Ross. Barry Devine’s chapter on James Joyce fulfils the volume’s quest not to dwell on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as it studies Dubliners, a text which has not sufficiently been studied in relation to Bildung. Devine uses the idea of the undeveloped “bud” (p. 19) of Bildung as a discrete moment of development for the characters of the short stories. Gregory Castle returns to Oscar Wilde and Elizabeth Bowen, describing how both achieve Bildung through aesthetic experience, rather than submitting to the dialectic of self and society. The section concludes with Patrick Bixby’s study of Samuel Beckett’s work using Max Nordau’s Entartung, which Beckett became familiar with during his travels through Germany in the 1930s. Beckett’s texts, in particular the Trilogy, seem to parody the Bildungsroman genre, proposing, on the contrary, that as bodies grow, they necessarily become “degenerate” (p. 239). It is this degeneracy which confirms their humanity.

6The final section covers Irish Bildungsromane from 1950 to the present, a period of unprecedented social change across the island, reflected in the thematic concerns of this section’s authors which range from the Good Friday Agreement to post-Celtic Tiger immigrant narratives, taking in gender and sexuality. The works studied in this section all deviate from classical versions of the genre, often eschewing narrative resolution and queering traditional linear time. Fiona McCann’s chapter discusses the pertinence of a genre associated with identity construction for the Northern Irish statelet, a fact which has not escaped previous studies on the question. The originality of McCann’s chapter is to focus on works written after the Good Friday Agreement and which have been neglected in previous studies. The texts chosen illustrate Bildung in relation to parental dereliction, education and both gender and genre. A preoccupation with gender follows through into Molly Ferguson’s chapter on two Emma Donoghue novels, one from her early career and a much more recent one. They have in common a concentration of growth over a very short period of time, and Ferguson usefully highlights Donoghue’s use of trauma time, as it has been theorised by Jenny Edkins. Ellen Scheible brings the centuries-old conflation of the maternal with the nation into a very contemporary light, discussing post-Celtic Tiger narratives of the reproductive failure of the maternal body, which becomes associated with the economic failures of Ireland after years of ostentatious financial success. She fruitfully explores a favouring of the idea of “failing” as a process over “failure” (p. 317). The volume concludes with Pilar Villar-Argáiz’s chapter on migrant manifestations of the Bildungsroman. Insisting that there is no universal story of migrant Bildung, Villar-Argáiz demonstrates two different narratives of growth in the works of Landawo and Theophilus Ejorh.

7The volume brings together thirteen essays which are all outstanding pieces of scholarship in their own right, and it is all the more impressive an achievement that it reads as a unified piece of work with each chapter building fruitfully on the previous ones. This is partly achieved through the consistency with which the theoretical framework is deployed, each chapter building on the work of Gregory Castle, Franco Moretti and Jed Esty in the most pertinent way for their period and theme.

8The volume certainly achieves its goal of taking the Irish Bildungsroman out from Joyce’s shadow. It may never resolve the contradictions between the traditional Western European definition of the genre in the Irish context, but it rewards the reader with fresh perspectives on the usefulness of reflecting on Irish texts in the light of this tradition.

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Helen Penet, « The Irish Bildungsroman, Gregory Castle, Sarah L. Townsend, Matthew L. Reznicek (eds.) »Études irlandaises, 50-2 | 2025, 168-170.

Référence électronique

Helen Penet, « The Irish Bildungsroman, Gregory Castle, Sarah L. Townsend, Matthew L. Reznicek (eds.) »Études irlandaises [En ligne], 50-2 | 2025, mis en ligne le 05 décembre 2025, consulté le 18 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/21221 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15aa7

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Helen Penet

Université de Lille

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