Künstlerroman

A Künstlerroman (German pronunciation: [ˈkʏnstlɐ.ʁoˌmaːn]; plural -ane), meaning "artist's novel" in English, is a narrative about an artist's growth to maturity.^[1][2]

It may be classified as a specific subgenre of Bildungsroman;^[3] such a work, usually a novel, tends to depict the conflicts of a sensitive youth against the values of a middle and upper class society of his or her time.

Examples

In German

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1795 Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
• Ludwig Tieck's 1798 Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen
• Novalis's 1802 Heinrich von Ofterdingen
• Hermann Hesse's Demian (1919) and Klingsor's Last Summer (1920)
• Thomas Mann's Tonio Kröger (1903), and Doctor Faustus (1947)
• Jakob Wassermann's 1915 Das Gänsemännchen
• Rainer Maria Rilke's 1910 The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

In English

• 1805 William Wordsworth's The Prelude
• 1847 Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre
• 1848 Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
• 1850 Charles Dickens' David Copperfield
• 1852 Herman Melville's Pierre: or, The Ambiguities
• 1856 Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh
• 1875 Henry James's Roderick Hudson
• 1890 Henry James's The Tragic Muse
• 1903 Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh
• 1909 Jack London Martin Eden
• 1913 D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers
• 1915 W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage
• 1915 Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark
• 1916 James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• 1918 Wyndham Lewis's Tarr
• 1920 F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise
• 1928 Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness
• 1929 Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel
• 1933 Malcolm Lowry's Ultramarine
• 1936 George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying
• 1939 John Fante's Ask the Dust
• 1945 Richard Wright's Black Boy
• 1947 W.O. Mitchell's Who Has Seen the Wind
• 1955 William Gaddis's The Recognitions
• 1961 Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy
• 1970 Patrick White's The Vivisector
• 1971 Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women
• 1972 Chaim Potok's My Name Is Asher Lev
• 1973 Milan Kundera's Life Is Elsewhere
• 1974 Margaret Laurence's The Diviners
• 1978 John Irving's The World According to Garp
• 1988 Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye
• 1999 Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring^[4]
• 2003 Jennifer Donnelly's A Northern Light
• 2006 Alison Bechdel's Fun Home
• 2006 Stew's Passing Strange
• 2010 Eileen Myles's Inferno (A Poet's Novel)
• 2010 Wena Poon's Alex y Robert, the Asian American Künstlerroman

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 French

• 1831, 1837 Honore de Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece
• 1904–1905 Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe
• 1913 Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time^[5][6]

In Italian

• Gabriele D'Annunzio's Il Piacere, Le Vergini Delle Rocce and Il Fuoco
• 1975 Gavino Ledda's My Father, My Master (Padre Padrone)

In Icelandic

• Halldór Laxness's World Light
• Halldór Laxness's The Fish Can Sing

In Russian

• Vladimir Nabokov's The Gift

In Croatian

• 1932 Miroslav Krleža's The Return of Filip Latinovicz

In Malayalam

• 1993 Perumbadavam Sreedharan's Oru Sankeerthanam Pole

In Portuguese

• 1883 Maria Benedita Bormann's Lésbia^[7]

In Turkish

• 1896-1897 Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil's Blue and Black (Mavi ve Siyah)

References

1. Werlock, James P. (2010) The Facts on File companion to the American short story, Volume 2, p.387
2. A Studio of One's Own: Fictional Women Painters and the Art of Fiction by Roberta White (page 13) published 2005 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Crops. Accessed Via Google Books August 13, 2013.
3. Germaine de Staël in Germany: Gender and Literary Authority by Judith E. Martin (page 128) 2001 Fairleigh & Dickinson University Press
4. Miriam de Paiva Vieira, "From Canvas to Paper: The Novel by Tracy Chevalier", Art and New Media: Vermeer’s Work under Different Semiotic Systems p.19
5. John Neary Something and nothingness: the fiction of John Updike & John Fowles p.54
6. Gilles Deleuze. Marcel Proust et les signes. Paris: PUF, 1964]
7. Rodríguez, Ileana; Szurmuk, Mónica (2015), The Cambridge History of Latin American Women's Literature (ebook), New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 212