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.

DEFINE: Clarifies how the bildungsroman and romance have conventionally been defined in Western literature.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 476