Künstlerroman

Künstlerroman (plural ‐mane), the German term (meaning ‘artist‐novel’) for a novel in which the central character is an artist of any kind, e.g. the musical composer Leverkühn in Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus (1947), or the painter Lantier in Zola's L'Oeuvre (1886). Although this category of fiction often overlaps with the Bildungsroman in showing the protagonist's development from childhood or adolescence—most famously in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)—it also includes studies of artists in middle or old age, and sometimes of historical persons: in David Malouf's An Imaginary Life (1978), for example, the central character and narrator is the Roman poet Ovid (43BCE–17CE).

The title of this article contains the character ü. Where it is unavailable, the name may be represented as Kuenstlerroman.

A Künstlerroman ("artist's novel", German pronunciation: [ˈkʏnstlɐ.roˌmaːn]; plural -ane) is a specific sub-genre of Bildungsroman; it is a novel about an artist's growth to maturity. Such novels often depict the struggles of a sensitive youth against the values of a bourgeois society of his or her time.

Examples

In English

• Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior
• D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers
• F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise
• W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage
• Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel
• Charles Dickens' David Copperfield
• Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy
• Willa Cather's Song of the Lark
• Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse
• Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness
• George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying
• Richard Wright's Black Boy
• Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye
• Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev
• Patrick White's The Vivisector
• Elizabeth Barret Browning's Aurora Leigh
• Henry James's Roderick Hudson
• Henry James's The Tragic Muse
• John Fante's "Ask the Dust"
• Wyndham Lewis's "Tarr"
• William Wordsworth's "The Prelude"
• Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
• Herman Melville's Pierre: or, The Ambiguities
• Margaret Laurence's The Diviners

Alasdair Gray's Lanark: A Life in Four Books consists of four books arranged in the order 3, 1, 2, 4; books 1 and 2 constituting a Künstlerroman. In John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy, the Camera Eye sections add up to a modernist autobiographical Künstlerroman. John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse is a collection of short stories that are often read as a postmodernist Künstlerroman.

In German

• Hermann Hesse's Demian and Klingsor's Last Summer
• Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Doktor Faustus
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther

In Russian

• Vladimir Nabokov's The Gift

References

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