Female Bildungsroman in the Narrative of African Women Writers

This paper addresses the ‘Bildungsroman’ genre in African postcolonial narratives. It mainly focuses on African women writers’ literary works and, specifically, aims to shed light on how they blend female subjugation with an unknown genre in the narrative of female characterization and autobiographies. The study also evidences that, even though, the term ‘Bildungsroman’ is German in origin, i.e., ‘bildung’, which means apprenticeship, self-cultivation, formation, etc; and the word ‘roman’ which means novel, the concept is fully adapted and adopted in African male and female writers’ literary discourses. Thus the paper seeks to demonstrate that colonization in Africa has had intellectual impacts on modern African literature, as the pioneers of contemporary African literature have used foreign languages to write back, claim cultural retrieval, independence and represent their own experience through their own perspective and narrative in the midst of their protagonists’ psychological and physical transformation.