Bildungsroman

The term was coined in 1819 by Johann Karl Simon Morgenstern, a philologist and professor at the University of Dorpat (now Tartu, Estonia), who introduced it in a university lecture, noting it had never been used before. He applied it to novels tracing a protagonist's formation, citing Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795). Wilhelm Dilthey later used it in an 1870 biography and popularised it in his 1905 essay collection, anchoring it in the literary canon.