KIM SCOTT's True Country (1993) recounts the story of a young teacher, Billy Storey, who volunteers to work at a remote Aboriginal outpost in Australia, a mission station called Karnama. The Aboriginal identity of Billy's paternal grandmother has only recently been revealed to him, and the story begins as a somewhat confused quest for Aboriginal connections. The story that is the novel and the experience of reading the novel have much in common with the German Bildungsroman genre. First popular as a classification for certain eighteenth-century novels, the Bildungsroman usually focuses on the development of an individual finding his way from adolescence into adulthood, figuring out an individual identity for himself. In the earliest examples, the individual was typically male. More recently, as former colonies have gained independence, the Bildungsroman form has become a particularly viable and important genre that reflects postcolonial struggles for identity. The Bildungsroman has burst its European origins and become a genre particularly suitable in postcolonial contexts; indeed, it has become a prime example of how indigenous peoples can use European literary forms effectively as part of their own arsenal of cultural resistance and as a source for regeneration.

The two elements of the compound noun Bildungsroman are the words Bildung and Roman. Whereas the English translation of Roman is “novel,” Bildung is more difficult to translate. Bildung is the nominative form of the verb bilden, to form. The word Bildung is often translated into English as “education,” losing the strong sense of formation and acculturation that resonates in German. Bildung cannot be adequately translated out of German and retain its full significance. Although convention varies, I italicize both Bildung and Bildungsroman in this essay to emphasize the particularly German (foreign) roots of the terms, as a reminder not to reductively translate the word into a less precise signifier.