The Oral Tale and the Bildungsroman Form in Conrad’s Lord Jim and Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard

Abstract: To date, much of the scholarship of the Bildungsroman has hewed close to national borders and conventional literary periods. This article offers a new methodology for reading the anglophone Bildungsroman through constellations of novels that share essential generic and formal features that are grafted onto the teleological plot of the Bildungsroman, warping its narrative form. Joseph Conrad and Amos Tutuola, although they are separated by time and distance, both introduce a constructed orality into the Bildungsroman, and with it a novel chronotopic arrangement that reorients the famously teleological Bildungsroman beyond the limits of conventional realism and the metropole.