The bildungsroman, with its elegant arc charting a protagonist's progression from childhood to maturity, is one of literature's most familiar and enduring genres. Yet in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries a series of novels appeared that began to upend this classical formula. Rather than moving smoothly into adulthood, the characters in these new coming of age fictions
seemed to veer off course into a state of suspended or stunted adolescence.
Modernist-era novels of unseasonable youth disrupt the inherited conventions of the bildungsroman in order to criticize bourgeois values and to reinvent the biographical plot, but also to
explore the contradictions inherent in developmental discourses of self, nation, and empire. Narratives of world progress run up against stubborn developmental obstacles, just at the same
moment that post-Darwinian racial sciences and Freudian sexological theories were lending influence to the idea that some forms of human difference cannot be mitigated by civilizing forces. In
this context, the modernist bildungsroman can be seen as narrating the gradual displacement of historical-progressive thinking by anthropological-structural thinking in the Age of Empire.
Jed Esty follows this fascinating line of argument through analysis of novels by Kipling, Wilde, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Rhys, and others to reveal how intertwined tropes of frozen youth and
uneven development, as motifs of failed progress, play a crucial role in the emergence of dilatory modernist style and in the re-imagination of colonial space at the fin de si簿聶翻cle.
