Introduction

Witnessing the generation of youth who grew up under a regime of multiple crises and geopolitical shifts in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, artists, film directors and literary writers in the Sinosphere, as well as across the globe, have addressed the new generations’ efforts to find a meaningful place in the world, with a heightened awareness of the existential uncertainty ushered in by a world in disarray. Their coming-of-age narratives frequently engage with the genre of the Bildungsroman, integrating selected topics and patterns from the genre while concomitantly adding new meanings depending on the different locations and times from which they hail. Before taking a closer look at the modern and contemporary Sinophone narratives presented in this book, we provide a quick overview of recently contributed, critical approaches to Bildungsroman research to delimit the foundations on which the new narratives are built and, in this way, help us to re-evaluate the particular aesthetic, cultural, and educational approaches to childhood as articulated in this body of literary texts and audiovisual representations.