Bildungsroman

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

While the 2017 Booker Prize-shortlisted “4321” was a hulking, sprawling bildungsroman that charted one man’s four lives in long, meandering sentences, “Baumgartner” is a more scaled-down, stripped-back affair that traces a single life-trajectory in a more conventional way.

From Los Angeles Times

Following the Italian director’s rollicking masterpiece of transposed adaptation “Martin Eden,” which dropped Jack London’s American bildungsroman onto sometime-in-the-20th-century Naples, Marcello has turned to another literary work, Russian author Aleksandr Grin’s 1923 novella, “Scarlet Sails,” setting his filmic embellishing in poverty-stricken post-World War I Normandy, France.

From Los Angeles Times

This isn’t just another multiverse slogfest but a bildungsroman.

From New York Times

“On a surface level, it is a bildungsroman for queer millennials, complete with a reference to Goethe, capturing the mundanity and fragility of existence under capitalism, the ever-present threat of poverty, and the incandescent promise of joy,” read the New York Journal of Books.

From Seattle Times

“This Isn’t Going to End Well” gives off the particular radiance of a life lived hard, whatever else: as such, a brand of American bildungsroman.

From Washington Post