Introduction

In order to place three distinct novels under a comparative lens, it is important to recognize that the bildungsroman has a complicated genealogy with messy routes and to further study these routes on a literary map, drawing the genre’s movements across national borders. Recognizing the complicated genealogy allows us to envision James Joyce, Ahdaf Soueif, and Somaya Ramadan’s novels in relation to one another, despite their disparate location and time, and imagine an exchange between the three protagonists, Asya, Stephen, and Kimi, as a natural reaction to the genre’s multifaceted and messy journeys. This work aims to relocate spatially and chronologically the bildungsroman tradition from an exclusively Western scene outwards toward a global scene, to challenge narrowly defined national canons by analyzing the bildungsroman as a genre in motion, and to read Soueif, Ramadan, and Joyce’s novels alongside one another to better understand the evolution of a coming-of-age tradition and its cultural translation across space and time.