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This study aims to present Pinocchio's road to adulthood based on the concept of the Bildungsroman, beginning with the original version by Carlo Collodi and continuing through the subsequent versions created by the Greek author, Christos Boulotis.
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The concept of the Bildungsroman: The road to adulthood
The Adventures of Pinocchio is one of the most widely read books in children's literature. It belongs to the category of Bildungsroman novels, as the hero of the book, Pinocchio, follows a winding path through multiple adventures to eventual adulthood. This is to show that he is mature enough to undergo the final transformation, to be turned from a wooden puppet into a real boy in the end. Carlo Collodi, his creator, gives him the possibility of going through all the transformations in order to reach the final and highest level, that of a human being. Christos Boulotis, the Greek writer, keeps the original material of the text, wood, and continues the adventures of the hero, not in his homeland of Italy, but in Greece.
According to Jeffrey L. Sammons (1991), the Bildungsroman was the dominant form of the German novel in the 19th century. This concept is concerned with understanding those works that are preoccupied with the idea of Bildung, meaning the idea of cultivation through a harmony of aesthetic, moral, rational, and scientific education which was the basic idea of the Enlightenment, as reported by Fritz Martini (1991). It is this broader sense that has lapsed into the general usage of the term to describe stories about "growing up." However, the consensus among scholars of the Bildungsroman is a view that takes two realities into account, by recognizing that Bildung, as a concept, must be understood culturally. According to James N. Hardin (1991), the concept of Bildung should be understood first as a developmental process and then as a collective name for the cultural and spiritual processes of a specific people or social stratum in a given historical epoch. Sammons (1991) adds that the concept of Bildung is intensely bourgeois. It includes many cases that concern the autonomy and integrity of the self, the potential self-creative energies, and a range of options relating to social and psychological determinants. The Bildung...