Künstlerroman

A Künstlerroman (German pronunciation: [ˈkʏnstlɐ.ʁoˌmaːn]; plural -ane), meaning "artist's novel" in German, is a narrative about an artist's growth to maturity. It may be classified as a specific sub-genre of Bildungsroman; such a work, usually a novel, tends to depict the conflicts of a sensitive youth against the values of a bourgeois society of his or her time.

Examples

In German

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1774 The Sorrows of Young Werther
• Ludwig Tieck's 1798 Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen
• Hermann Hesse's Demian (1919) and Klingsor's Last Summer (1920)
• Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (1912), Tonio Kröger (1903), and Doktor Faustus (1947)
• Jakob Wassermann's 1915 Das Gänsemännchen

In English

• 1805 William Wordsworth's "The Prelude"
• 1848 Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
• 1850 Charles Dickens' David Copperfield
• 1852 Herman Melville's Pierre: or, The Ambiguities
• 1856 Elizabeth Barret Browning's Aurora Leigh
• 1875 Henry James's Roderick Hudson
• 1890 Henry James's The Tragic Muse
• 1909 Jack London Martin Eden
• 1913 D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers
• 1914 James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• 1915 W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage
• 1915 Willa Cather's Song of the Lark
• 1918 Wyndham Lewis's "Tarr"
• 1920 F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise
• 1927 Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse
• 1928 Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness
• 1929 Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel
• 1936 George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying
• 1939 John Fante's "Ask the Dust"
• 1945 Richard Wright's Black Boy
• 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
• 1988 Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye
• 2006 Alison Bechdel's Fun Home
• 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

• 1913 Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time

In Italian

• Gavino Ledda's My Father, My Master

In Icelandic

• Halldór Laxness's World Light

In Russian

• Vladimir Nabokov's The Gift
• 2011 Pavel Kostin's It's Time (Время Пришло)

In Croatian

• Miroslav Krleža's The Return of Filip Latinovicz