Background: Coming-of-age narratives are educationally significant because they represent how children and adolescents negotiate family pressure, school experience, social expectation, emotional difficulty, and moral choice. The Bildungsroman offers a particularly useful theoretical reference point, since the genre foregrounds psychological and moral development and is closely associated with formation and education. Purpose: This article compares six recent Chinese and Anglophone works of coming-of-age literature for children and adolescents. It examines how these texts construct educational meanings and how family, school, teachers, peers, community, labor, and self-narration operate as agents of formation. Method: The study adopts qualitative comparative textual analysis. The corpus consists of Wu Zhouxing’s The Astragalus Choir , Xu Nuochen’s Perfect Dive, Zuo Xuan’s My World, Sabaa Tahir’s All My Rage, Malinda Lo’s Last Night at the Telegraph Club, and Erin Entrada Kelly’s The First State of Being. The coding framework includes five dimensions: developmental dilemma, educational agent, mode of education, moral formation, and developmental outcome. Findings: The Chinese texts more often connect growth with rural community, aesthetic participation, bodily discipline, labor experience, teacher guidance, and collective responsibility. The Anglophone texts place greater emphasis on trauma repair, identity negotiation, emotional support, self-narration, and ethical choice. This difference should not be reduced to a binary opposition between collectivism and individualism. Rather, it reveals two narrative grammar rules for imagining how adolescents become moral and social subjects. Contribution: The article shows that coming-of-age literature can illuminate dimensions of formation that are often weakened in policy and assessment discourses, including emotional recognition, relational support, identity work, ethical imagination, and value internalization.
References
[1] Gasser, L., Dammert, Y., Murphy, P. K. (2022) How do children socially learn from narrative fiction: Getting the lesson, simulating social worlds, or dialogic inquiry? Educational Psychology Review, 34(3), 1445-1475.
[2] Adigüzel, F. B., Ayaz, P. (2020) Values in Youth Literature: the case of Bridge Books. African Educational Research Journal, 8(3), 551-559.
[3] Kucirkova, N. (2019) How could children’s storybooks promote empathy? A conceptual framework based on developmental psychology and literary theory. Frontiers in psychology, 10, 121.
[4] Wahid, M. E., Ain, R., Abdul, M. L., Rahman, D. A. H. S. A. (2024) Digital folk literature as a need for educational transformation: a literary narrative. International Journal of Academic Research in Progressive Education and Development, 13(4), 3439-3460.
[5] Branje, S., De Moor, E. L., Spitzer, J., Becht, A. I. (2021) Dynamics of identity development in adolescence: a decade in review. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 31(4), 908-927.
[6] Verhoeven, M., Poorthuis, A. M., Volman, M. (2019) The role of school in adolescents’ identity development. A literature review. Educational Psychology Review, 31(1), 35-63.
[7] Verbiest, C., Murnan, R. (2022) Using literature to support adolescent identity development: a critical perspective. Teacher Educators’ Journal, 15(2), 131-156.
[8] Bleazby, J. (2020) Fostering moral understanding, moral inquiry & moral habits through philosophy in schools: a Deweyian analysis of Australia’s Ethical Understanding curriculum. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 52(1), 84-100.
[9] Krettenauer, T. (2020) Moral identity as a goal of moral action: a Self-Determination Theory perspective. Journal of Moral Education, 49(3), 330-345.
[10] Li, Y., Cheng, H., Qin, Q. (2025) Evaluations and improvement methods of deep learning ability in blended learning. International Journal of e-Collaboration (IJeC), 21(1), 1-17.
Share and Cite
Du, J., Ji, J., Wang, Z. (2026) Educational Meanings in Chinese and Anglophone Coming-of-age Literature for Children and Adolescents: A Qualitative Comparative Textual Analysis. Global Education Bulletin, 3(1), 57-63. https://doi.org/10.71052/grb2025/CZDM6971