Publisher's Synopsis
The book is a unique literary study of the heroine's growth through the ages. This is also a great contribution to literary criticism and philosophical thought. This book proposes a relationship between the novel that explores the heroine's maturity (bildungsroman) and the spirit of her age (zeitgeist). Put another way, how an author of bildungsroman defines and measures maturity and the process through which her heroine matures changes between the neoclassical, romantic, realist, naturalist, modernist, and postmodernist periods, and continues to change in the post-postmodernist period.
