The Post Bildungsroman: Coming of Age at the Margins
By (Author) Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo
Contributions by Lan Dong
Contributions by Jay N. Shelat
Contributions by Akash Belsare
Contributions by Kevin A. Blanks
Contributions by Laura Soderberg
Contributions by Cara Anne Kinnally
Contributions by Evan Chaloupka
Contributions by Jennifer Holl
Contributions by Rosalind Sibielski
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
2nd October 2025
United States
Professional and Scholarly
Non Fiction
Popular culture
Hardback
256
Width 152mm, Height 229mm
The Post Bildungsroman reimagines the coming-of-age genre, exploring youth, identity, and belonging in narratives at the margins of comics, videogames, and experimental novels.
Throughout this collection, contributors use the theoretical framework of the Bildungsroman to analyze youth development, identity-in-flux, decolonial logic, as well as negotiation of maturity and belonging in contemporary narratives at the margins of literature (sequential art, comics, videogames, experimental novels, etc.). This edited collection subverts colonial and narrow apologies of the Bildungsroman that claim it to be an exclusively European, enlightened sub-genre of the novel
Every so often, a scholarly work shatters tired and misaligned coordinates, forcing a radical recalibration of how we map the architecture of narrative worlds. The Post-Bildungsroman does exactly that. In Growing Up in the Gutter, Quintana-Vallejo cracked open the stale Euro-Enlightenment mold. Now, alongside a visionary crew of critical thinkers, he redraws the literary periodic table from the ground up. They dont just critique the Euro-bildungsromanthey alchemically conjure its transformation. They surface a long-buried element: the global, decolonial multiplicities of youth self-making pulsing through literature, comics, video games, multimediated narratives, and beyond. Brazen. Brilliant. Boundary-breaking! * Frederick Luis Aldama, Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, UT Austin, USA *
Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo is Assistant Professor of English at Rhode Island College.