Conclusion

By starting from multiple beginnings and tracing the continuities of a genre that travels along multiple nonlinear paths, this work creates a new type of continuity, one in which the bildungsroman tradition now has seemingly limitless potential for travel. The bildungsroman is no longer limited to a certain country, gender, or even century; its tradition can span millennia and all manners of human condition. It is vital to see multiple worlds as shaping forces of a literary genre in order to dismantle the notion of center and periphery and read forms emerging outside the West as “unique”, or, as the case of Ahdaf Soueif and Somaya Ramadan’s bildungsroman novels, different by kind and not just by degree.