The Bildungsroman in Motion

Chapter 2 of this book, titled “The Bildungsroman in Motion”, demonstrates how one could trace the bildungsroman tradition across time and space to explore how literary forms and genres travel. As the genre traveled, it created in its journey new lines on the intellectual map of the world, lines that illustrate a variety of literary networks of transmission, reception, and circulation of Joyce’s iconic bildungsroman text. By tracing the reception and circulation of Joyce’s work in the Arab world, I add to the discourse a book that illustrates Joyce’s bildungsroman text in motion, traveling to the Arab world, and specifically to Egypt where it poses a direct and indirect influence on Egyptian writers such as Ahdaf Soueif and Somaya Ramadan, who have written their own Arab female bildungsroman novels 76 and 85 years later.