Making Connections: Network Analysis, the Bildungsroman, and the World of The Absentee

In the late eighteenth century, European novelists discovered youth. Writers like Goethe, Austen and Scott developed a new genre, the Bildungsroman, in which young, enthusiastic protagonists explore the world, develop themselves and find a place to remain. This, at least, has been a popular argument in modern criticism. Recently, however, Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse have brought it into question. Studying a number of British and American novels, they show that an alternative genre, the ‘network novel’, arose in the period, which ‘disrupted’ the image of an organic, domestic world that lay at the heart of the ‘domestic novel’ (their term for the classical Bildungsroman). Here, I propose that the ‘network novel’ and the ‘domestic novel’ can actually be seen as two distinct but interrelated aspects of the Bildungsroman. To demonstrate this, I use Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee (1812) as a case study, utilising Franco Moretti’s innovative digital technique, ‘character network analysis’, to analyse its structure.