A Study Guide for "Bildungsroman," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Literary Movements for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Literary Movements for Students for all of your research needs.

After her mother's death, Julie goes to live with Aunt Cordelia, a spinster schoolteacher, where she experiences many emotions and changes as she grows from seven to eighteen.

A comic novel of three young men who "borrow" an automobile for a hilarious journey in Memphis. Wild humor and frenetic action do not, however, obscure the development of moving and tender human relationships and moral insights into human conduct.

Devastated when her best friend moves away, sixteen-year-old Jessica Darling feels isolated at school and at home, as she struggles to deal with her father's obsession with her track meets, her boy-crazy peers, and her own nonexistent love life.

The story of a young couple in love and their struggle to maintain a relationship while the young man is incarcerated for a horrendous crime. In their letters beginning in 1990, Natasha and Antonio look back at their courtship against the landscape of their beloved Harlem.

England, 1976. Mrs. Creasy is missing and the Avenue is alive with whispers. The neighbors blame her sudden disappearance on the heat wave, but ten-year-olds Grace and Tilly aren't convinced. As the summer shimmers endlessly on, the girls decide to take matters into their own hands. Inspired by the local vicar, they go looking for God--they believe that if they find Him they might also find Mrs. Creasy and bring her home. Spunky, spirited Grace and...

A mesmerizing labyrinth of art, magic, and cryptic love sparks the imagination in this arresting first novel about a young man's quest to unravel the puzzle his missing girlfriend may (or may not) have left behind.

What are the boundaries between imagination and delusion? When Ella's father John dies unexpectedly, she learns that the past she believed in never really happened. For more than twenty years, Ella has learned to live without her mother, learned to forget the woman with paranoid delusions who abandoned their small family the summer Ella turned ten, learned to accept the likely scenario that her homeless mother died on the streets. But John's accident...

Black Swan Green tracks a single year in what is, for thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in Worchestershire in a dying Cold War England, 1982. But author David Mitchell creates an exquistitely observed world that is anything but sleepy: a world of the cruel, luscious Dawn Madden and her power-hungry boyfriend; of a certain Madame Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, an elderly bohemian emigre; of first cigarettes, first kisses, and first...

"A dazzling new novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris, by the acclaimed and award-winning author Rebecca Makkai In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic...