Giovanna Summerfield is Associate Professor of Italian and French at Auburn University, USA. Lisa Downward is Assistant Professor of Italian at Marist College, New York, USA.

"An essential book that re-orients thinking about a vexed literary genre, bringing out the Masonic background of the Bildungsroman and convincingly presenting the important contribution of women on its variable spectrum."

• Introduction \Part I. Spirituality Giovanna Summerfield\1. Mastery and Apprenticeship(s): Departing from Goethe's Turm \2. The British Master: Defoe, Dickens and Kipling \3. The French Fellow Craft: Voltaire, Prévost, Stendhal \4. The Italian Apprentice: Foscolo, Collodi \5. From Bildungsroman to Bildungsreise \Part II. Gender Lisa Downward \6. The Dissolution of Gendered Plots: Wilhelm Meister and the Beautiful Soul \7. Female Developments in the Nineteenth Century: Neera's Teresa, Lydia and L'indomani, George Eliot's Middlemarch, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre \8. Female Developments in the Twentieth Century: Sibilla Aleramo's Una donna, Susanna Tamaro's Va' dove ti porta il cuore, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse \9. The Bildungsroman as Spectrum \Conclusion \Bibliography \Index