The Bildungsroman in Constellation

Chapter 3 : “The Bildungsroman in Constellation” brings to light the cultural exchange and translation of the bildungsroman genre through a comparative close reading of James Joyce’s A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man , Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun , and Somaya Ramadan’s Leaves of Narcissus . By tracing thematic and stylistic continuities and ruptures between the three bildungsroman novels, this close reading demonstrates how Arab female authors have appropriated the modernist bildungsroman tradition descending from Joyce. Through this appropriation, one can argue that this tradition has experienced its own coming of age, emerging as a new novel different by kind, not just by degree, that is, not merely another version of a bildungsroman but a new literary outcome of the bildungsroman genre.