Künstlerroman

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title: "Künstlerroman" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["künstlerroman", "fiction-by-genre", "german-words-and-phrases", "lists-of-books-by-genre", "novels-about-artists"] description: "Literary genre" topic_path: "geography/germany" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Künstlerroman" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Literary genre ::

A Künstlerroman (; plural -ane), meaning "artist's novel" in English, is a narrative about an artist's growth to maturity. It could be classified as a sub-category of Bildungsroman: a coming-of-age novel. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, one way a Künstlerroman may differ from a Bildungsroman is its ending, where a Künstlerroman hero rejects the everyday life, but a Bildungsroman hero settles for being an ordinary citizen. According to Oxford Reference, the difference may lie in a longer view across the Künstlerroman hero's whole life, not just their childhood years. A novel specifically about a female artist is a Künstlerinroman.

Examples by language

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
• Eduard Mörike's 1856 Mozart on the way to Prague

English

• 1805 William Wordsworth's The Prelude
• 1833–34 Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus
• 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
• 1901 Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career
• 1903 Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh
• 1908 Henry Handel Richardson's Maurice Guest
• 1909 Jack London's 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
• 1943 Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
• 1945 Richard Wright's Black Boy
• 1946 Philip Larkin's Jill
• 1947 W.O. Mitchell's Who Has Seen the Wind
• 1952 Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt
• 1955 William Gaddis's The Recognitions
• 1961 Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy
• 1963 Leonard Cohen's The Favourite Game
• 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
• 1981 Alasdair Gray's Lanark: A Life in Four Books
• 1982 Charles Bukowski's Ham on Rye
• 1983 Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street
• 1985 Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
• 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 Patti Smith's Just Kids
• 2010 Eileen Myles's Inferno (A Poet's Novel)
• 2010 Wena Poon's Alex y Robert
• 2011 Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station
• 2019 Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
• 2020 Andrew Unger's Once Removed
• 2022 Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Notes

• A semiautobiographical narrative takes up two of the four books of Gray's Lanark.
• 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.

French

• 1831, 1837 Honoré de Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece
• 1904–1905 Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe
• 1913–1927 Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time

Italian

• Gabriele D'Annunzio's Il Piacere, Le Vergini Delle Rocce and Il Fuoco
• 1975 Gavino Ledda's My Father, My Master (Padre Padrone)
• 2012–2015 Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels

Icelandic

• Halldór Laxness's The Fish Can Sing

Russian

• Vladimir Nabokov's The Gift
• Leo Tolstoy's trilogy of novellas Childhood, Boyhood, &Youth

Croatian

• 1932 Miroslav Krleža's The Return of Filip Latinovicz

Malayalam

• 1993 Perumbadavam Sreedharan's Oru Sankeerthanam Pole

Norwegian

• 2009–2011 Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle (Knausgård novels)
• 1890 Knut Hamsun's Hunger (“Sult”)

Danish

• 1967-1971 Tove Ditlevsen's The Copenhagen Trilogy

Portuguese

• 1883 Maria Benedita Bormann's Lésbia
• 1976 Ferreira Gullar's Poema Sujo

Turkish

• 1896–1897 Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil's Blue and Black (Mavi ve Siyah)
• 1972 Oğuz Atay’s Tutunamayanlar
• 1959 Yusuf Atılgan’s Aylak adam

Bengali

• 1917-1933 Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay's Srikanta
• 1999 Malay Roy Choudhury's Chhotoloker Chhotobela

References

References

1. Werlock, James P. (2010) [https://books.google.com/books?id=lWuyTK_0eBsC&pg=PA387 The Facts on File companion to the American short story], Volume 2, p.387
2. [https://books.google.com/books?id=bflZc3a6mxMC&dq=K%C3%BCnstlerroman+definition&pg=PA13 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. [https://books.google.com/books?id=MN4ZRn3D5PsC&dq=K%C3%BCnstlerroman+definition&pg=PA128 Germaine de Staël in Germany: Gender and Literary Authority] by Judith E. Martin (page 128) 2001 Fairleigh & Dickinson University Press
4. "Künstlerroman {{!}} literary genre".
5. "Künstlerroman". Oxford Reference. Retrieved 21 Nov. 2021, from https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100045770.
6. [[David Stephen Calonne. Calonne, David Stephen]]. Charles Bukowski. Reaktion Books, London, 2012. p. 146. {{ISBN. 978-1-78023-023-8
7. [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/oct/27/jeanettewinterson 'True stories'], John Mullan, [[The Guardian]], 27 October 2007.
8. Miriam de Paiva Vieira, "From Canvas to Paper: The Novel by Tracy Chevalier", [http://www.bibliotecadigital.ufmg.br/dspace/bitstream/handle/1843/ECAP-7A3H7K/dissertacao_mestrado_miriam_vieira.pdf?sequence=1 ''Art and New Media: Vermeer’s Work under Different Semiotic Systems''] p.19
9. John Neary [https://books.google.com/books?id=CpOa5vsGx34C&pg=PA54 ''Something and nothingness: the fiction of John Updike & John Fowles''] p.54
10. Gilles Deleuze. ''Marcel Proust et les signes''. Paris: PUF, 1964]
11. (2015). "The Cambridge History of Latin American Women's Literature". Cambridge University Press.

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