Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795-96) is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel following its young title character through a series of formative experiences, chiefly his passage from a theatrical troupe into the company of an aristocratic secret society, as he matures from an idealistic, directionless youth into a socially integrated adult. Its structure, tracing a protagonist's moral, psychological and social education toward a settled adult identity, became the model against which the critic Karl Morgenstern defined the Bildungsroman in 1819, and Goethe's novel is still generally cited as the genre's founding and defining case.
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The genre's defining case.
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