Coming-of-age stories focus on the growth of a protagonist from childhood to adulthood, although "coming of age" is a genre for a variety of media, including literature, theatre, film, television and video games.
A large portion of the manga industry is dedicated to teenagers, such as Weekly Shōnen Jump and Weekly Shōnen Magazine and, therefore, a majority of said manga contains some aspects of the protagonist's growth. Coming-of-age stories are called Shujinkō-Seichōkei (主人公成長系), meaning "protagonist's growth type".
In film, coming-of-age is a genre of teen films. Films in this subgenre include:
Films featuring protagonists in particular age groups, such as pre-teens, are:
or post-high school and college students, in films such as:
or people aged around 20 years old who do not go to college, such as:
or in the case of unique coming-of-age stories centered on post-college aged individuals, such as:
Coming-of-age television series include:
In literary criticism, a Bildungsroman is a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood, in which character change is important. The term comes from the German words Bildung and Roman ("novel").
Zora Neale Hurston was an American author, anthropologist, and documentary filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-20th-century American South and published research on hoodoo. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote over 50 short stories, plays, and essays.
Skywalker Sound is the American sound effects, sound editing, sound design, sound mixing and music recording division of Lucasfilm. Founded in 1975, the company's main facilities are located at George Lucas's Skywalker Ranch in Lucas Valley, near Nicasio, California.
Howie Weinberg is an American audio mastering engineer. Over the course of his career, he has received over 2,257 mastering credits, three TEC Awards, 21 Grammy Awards, two Juno Awards, and one Mercury Prize.
List of the published work of Joyce Carol Oates, American writer.
The two early English Bildungsromane already mentioned, Tom Jones and The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, are examples of coming-of-age narratives that predate the generic expectations of the German tradition.
In her introduction to the 1986 Virago edition, Holly Eley calls it "primarily a love story" and also "an account of a strong, intelligent (though uneducated) woman's steps towards self-fulfilment" (Hurston vii). In generic terms, this latter definition would make Hurston's novel a Bildungsroman, a story of (self-)education by life.