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The novel, according to standard scholarly narratives, depicts an individual's path to maturity. Scholarship on the rise of the novel in Germany and in Europe more broadly, from Watt to Moretti, has essentially collapsed the genre into the individualist Bildungsroman, exemplified by a narrow canon. This study challenges and nuances these narratives, first by expanding the focus from the individual to the family, second by broadening the field of novels treated to include not only canonical works but also so-called "trivial literature," and third, by reading novels alongside contemporarybiological, legal, and pedagogical texts. This perspective reveals that the novel and the family around 1800 were mutually constitutive and that the two together were instrumental in the developmentof conceptions of individuality, kinship, and society that are still relevant today. Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge reads novels by Goethe, Wolzogen, Engel, Karoline Fischer, August Lafontaine, and Brentano, showing that they exhibit varying degrees of "imaginative didacticism": suggestions not of what to think and feel, but that thinking and feeling in reaction to literature are centralto cultural practices of self-reflection and development. The family is a crucial locus for this practice, and reading novels together with non-literary texts illuminates how they experiment productively with the infinite possibilities presented by the relationships they portray.

Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

German fiction --- Families in literature. --- Family in literature --- History and criticism.

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"Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre served as a touchstone for major philosophical and literary figures of his age (including, among many others, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel, Schlegel, Schleiermacher and Novalis). But it has received far less attention in both disciplines (especially in English-language scholarship) than either Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther or Elective Affinities. This volume takes up the question of what Goethe's long and rather complicated novel is doing and how it engages with problems and themes of human life more generally, including issues of individuality, development, and authority; aesthetic formation and narrative (and human) contingency; gender, sexuality, and marriage; about power, institutions, and control"--

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, --- Philosophy, German --- Philosophy, German - 19th century --- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, - 1749-1832. - Zur Farbenlehre