Overview

The Post-Bildungsroman reimagines the coming-of-age genre, exploring youth, identity, and belonging in narratives at the margins of comics, videogames, and experimental novels. Throughout this collection, contributors use the theoretical framework of the Bildungsroman to analyze youth development, identity-in-flux, decolonial logic, as well as negotiation of maturity and belonging in contemporary narratives at the margins of literature (sequential art, comics, videogames, experimental novels, etc.). This edited collection subverts colonial and narrow apologies of the Bildungsroman that claim it to be an exclusively European, enlightened sub-genre of the novel

Full Product Details

Author:   Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo ,  Lan Dong ,  Jay N. Shelat ,  Akash Belsare
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Imprint:   Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN:  

9781666978988

ISBN 10:   1666978981
Pages:   232
Publication Date:   16 October 2025
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

List of Figures About the Contributors Coming of Age at the Margins of Literature and Western Modernity: An Introduction Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo (Rhode Island College) Part I: Coming-of-age in Experimental Text-Based Media: Comics and Narratives 1. Coming of Age in/between Fragments: Lisa Wool-Rim Sjoblom’s Palimpsest Documents from a Korean Adoption Lan Dong (University of Illinois Springfield) 2. Gay. Muslim. Terrorist?: Avin Ahmadi’s How It All Blew Up and The Age of Terror Jay N. Shelat (Ursinus College) 3. Superpowers, Race, and the Peter Parker Trope in Visual Media Akash Belsare (University of Illinois Springfield) 4. Black Boyhoods Yet to Come: Reimagining Race, Gender, and Black Childhood in Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits Kevin A. Blanks (George Washington University) 5. Coming-of-age Outside the Settler State: Darcie Little Badger’s Elatsoe and Native Sovereignty Laura Soderberg (University of Southern Indiana) Part II: Coming-of-age in Visual Media: Film and Videogames 6. Digital Migrants at the U.S.-Mexico Border in Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer Cara Anne Kinnally (Purdue University) 7. Gaming the Bildungsroman: Participatory Richness and Player-Character Intimacy in Persona V Evan Chaloupka (Franklin University) 8. And Will She Not Come Again: Unbecoming Ophelia in Elsinore Jennifer Holl (Rhode Island College) 9. Quoting from the Classics: Alice Wu’s The Half of It and the Queer Coming-of-Age Film Rosalind Sibielski (Rhode Island College) 10. A Theory of Coming-of-Age Videogames Using The Last of Us as Case Study Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo (Rhode Island College)

Reviews

Every so often, a scholarly work shatters tired and misaligned coordinates, forcing a radical recalibration of how we map the architecture of narrative worlds. The Post-Bildungsroman does exactly that. In Growing Up in the Gutter, Quintana-Vallejo cracked open the stale Euro-Enlightenment mold. Now, alongside a visionary crew of critical thinkers, he redraws the literary periodic table from the ground up. They don’t just critique the Euro-bildungsroman—they alchemically conjure its transformation. They surface a long-buried element: the global, decolonial multiplicities of youth self-making pulsing through literature, comics, video games, multimediated narratives, and beyond. Brazen. Brilliant. Boundary-breaking! * Frederick Luis Aldama, Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, UT Austin, USA *

Author Information

Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo is Assistant Professor of English at Rhode Island College.

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