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1. The Definition The term Bildungsroman itself was first coined by Karl Morgenstern in lectures in the early 1820s, with specific reference to Wilhelm Meister: “it portrays the Bildung of the hero in its beginnings and growth to a certain stage of completeness; . . . further[ing] the reader’s Bildung to a much greater extent than any other kind of novel.”The term didn’t gain currency, however, till Wilhelm Dilthey used it in Das Erlebnes und die Dichtung (Poetry and Experience) in 1913: the Bildungsroman examines a “legitimate course” of an individual’s development, each stage having its own specific value and serving as “the ground for a higher stage,” an upward and onward vision of human growth nowhere “more brightly and confidently expressed than in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister.”
2. Susanne Howe's idea of Wilhelm Meister as a Bildungsroman. The adolescent hero of the typical “apprentice” novel sets out on his way through the world, meets with reverses usually due to his own temperament, falls in with various guides and counsellors, makes many false starts in choosing his friends, his wife, and his life work, and finally adjusts himself in some way to the demands of his time and environment by finding a sphere of action in which he may work effectively. . . . Needless to say, the variations of it are endless.
 
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