Genre criticism

Abstract

As a novel concerned with the process of growing-up, Sons and Lovers belongs to a genre known as the Bildungsroman. The most sensitive study of the novel from this critical point of view is that of Jerome Hamilton Buckley [1974] who notes that the Bildungsroman has been defined as the ‘“novel of all-around development or self-culture” with “a more or less conscious attempt on the part of the hero to integrate his powers, to cultivate himself by his experience”’ [p. 13]. As Buckley points out, in England the Bildungsroman has also often been a Künstlerroman— a story about the growth of an artist. Just as in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Stephen Dedalus is learning to be a poet, or in Dickens’s David Copperfield David is an apprentice prose-writer, so in Sons and Lovers Paul is an aspiring painter. Typically, this genre offers a study of the development of the inner world of the artist from childhood through adolescence to young manhood, and, as in the case of Joyce, or Lawrence, the study is frequently close to autobiography. Herein lies the strength and weakness of the Bildungsroman, for the novelist must both draw on the immediate and authentic in his experience, and at the same time transcend it in order to achieve objectivity and artistic integrity.