Bildungsroman in Stardust and Varjak Paw

ALFONSO MATÉ VERA 10100169 FINAL ESSAY EN434 Children's Fiction

Jill May states that: “the traditional Bildungsroman heroes fit a home-awayhome pattern.” In your opinion, does this statement apply to children's fiction? Analyse the plot structure of two novels to show the journey away from home is a necessity for the hero to prove himself.
The German term Bildungsroman that means “novel of learning or formation” and it is applied to every piece of fiction in which the narration of the physical, moral, psychological or social development of a character, generally from the childhood to the mature, is the main topic. It was a recurrent motif in the Victorian literature and the main feature is its didactic function. If we applied that term to children's fiction, we can see the importance of a children's book, not only for entertaining or reading development, but also for the development of identity and the sense of the self. The two novels I am analyzing to prove how the journey away from home is a necessity and how it fits with the concept of Bildungsroman are Stardust by Neil Gaiman and Varjak Paw by SF Said. For that porpoise, I will take the scheme of the American philosopher Joseph Campbell who established in The Hero With A Thousand Faces that all heroes in all cultures and myths follow the same narrative pattern in their journeys: Separation - Struggle – Return, and Vladimir Propp's Morphology Of The Folktale functions. Stardust is considered a fairy tale for adults and it was first conceived as a graphic novel. The novel takes two of the nineteenth century traditions that are fairy tales and bildungsroman. The story is about how a young boy named Tristran Thorne left his town and his family to look for a fallen star in order to getting married with the girl he likes. It sounds typically, but later on we see how he is not the only one who is interested in the star, and how Tristan has to become an hero to defeat all the problems. Stardust works on all the...