Definition of "bildungsroman"

English speakers are more hospitable to fiction in translation, and yet when was the last time you heard someone mention “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship” or “Elective Affinities,” Goethe’s long fictions? These books have a good claim to have founded two of the major genres of the modern novel—respectively, the Bildungsroman and the novel of adultery.

2016 January 25, Adam Kirsch, “What’s great about Goethe?”, in The New Yorker

Goethe's honorific assignment to the vanguard of a uniquely German novelistic tradition of the bildungsroman simultaneously places him outside the mainstream of the development of the novel.

2020, Frederick Amrine, Goethe and the Myth of the Bildungsroman: Rethinking the Wilhelm Meister Novels, Cambridge University Press, page 2