Abstract
The novel resists abstraction, and represents the world by way of concrete particulars. This restricts its power to frame arguments about structures and causes. However, fictional characters and settings often represent historical and social tendencies, and nineteenth-century realists wrote notable documentary novels about the poor. Few recent novels attempt that kind of quasi-anthropological project. When Forster wrote in chapter six of Howards End that the novel was 'not concerned with the very poor', he implicitly acknowledged that in the era of democracy, documentary representation of the poor by the rich becomes culturally problematic. Several contemporary novelists who have written interestingly about class have turned, rather, to the Bildungsroman. The genre, when it explores the cultural construction of class through its depiction of social mobility, can offer a dialogic image of class relations, as is shown in a reading of work by James Kelman, Ali Smith, Alan Hollinghurst and Kazuo Ishiguro.
Keywords
Bildungsroman, class, contemporary novel, realism
How to Cite
Ryle, M., (2013) “Crisis, Class and the Novel: Recent British versions of the Bildungsroman”, C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings 2(1), 121–135.