A novel rejecting both bildungsroman and romance conventions transgresses literature’s basic rules

Evidence

From a formal perspective, I prefer to attribute the peculiar tensions engendered by aspects of Minaret to two sources: first, readers’ discomfort in the mismatch between their expectations of the genres of which this novel partakes—the bildungsroman and the romance—and the plot resolution; and, second, the novel’s refusal to take on the challenge of finding an alternative to prosaic realism as a vehicle for espousing transcendental belief. In the Western tradition, the bildungsroman has usually been defined in relation to active self-realization through material or social integration and reward or, conversely, through rejection of such goals. The development of the self is commensurate with a “coming in” to the bosom of society in the classic realist novel. Conversely, within literary modernism these comforts may ultimately be rejected, but they are rejected by the heroic will of agents who prefer isolation or even death to social conformity. In the romance, the main narrative energies are directed toward emotional and erotic fulfillment. A novel such as Minaret that deliberately rejects both models, without any compensatory material advancement or sense of secular gender solidarity, seems to transgress some of the basic “rules” of literature as it is understood to have developed. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 476

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Defines the bildungsroman as ‘coming in’ to society and romance as emotional fulfillment, establishing a vocabulary for why spiritual novels feel formally transgressive.
• XREF: Directly portable to reading Naqvi’s Home Boy (bildungsroman frustrations) and Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (romance/rejection structures) as evidence of genre friction.

Related

• Novels rejecting bildungsroman and romance conventions without compensation read as rule-breaking (similarity 0.94)
• Romance conventions can be redirected to valorize spiritual over sensual fulfillment (similarity 0.83)
• The novel form resists being repurposed for transcendental religious belief (similarity 0.80)
• The novel form carries three centuries of secular individualism shaping its possibilities (similarity 0.79)
• Religious romance archetypes structure the secular Western novel’s conventions. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Novelistic protagonists need not pursue individual fulfillment to be compelling #expands (0.70)