KUNSTLERROMAN

The Künstlerroman, also called the artist novel, is an important subtype of the Bildungsroman. It represents the growth of a writer or other artist into a condition of maturity that is marked by a recognition of art as the protagonist’s calling and by a mastery of an artistic craft. A related subtype is the Erziehungsroman (educational novel), which also presents the development of a hero from childhood to maturity, and has one or more teachers directly guiding the protagonist. Another subtype that occasionally overlaps with the Bildungsroman is the picaresque novel, which narrates the escapades of a rascal who lives by his wits in a sordid environment. The picaresque novel, however, has its origins in Spain; the Bildungsroman, as one might expect, has its roots in German literature.

Künstlerroman Example

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

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

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