Among the notable contributions that writers from German speaking countries have rendered to
world literature the concept and creation of the Bildungsroman the Novel of Development ranks
high. The narrative of a young man's or woman's slow and often circuitous path to his or her
personal destiny and societal role found numerous imitators. They obviously answered a need in
modernity when the unique individuality of all men and women were being recognized and
respected. The English novel of the eighteenth century and in particular Fielding with his Tom
Jones during a time of the rising bourgeoisie provided Wieland Goethe and other German
writers with important building blocks which they in turn reshaped and varied as the modern
Bildungsroman was being born. Years later it would return to England so that another scholar
could coin the phrase of «Wilhelm Meister and his English kinsmen». In tracing one aspect of
the inter-relatedness of world cultures and literature the book which - in its original form -
was presented as the author's Ph.D. thesis at Columbia University in 1953 makes its delayed
but very timely contribution to the concept of cultural globalisation.
