Künstlerroman
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A Künstlerroman (pronounced [/ˈkʏnstlɐ.roˌmaːn/], German: "artist's novel") 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.
Famous German-language Künstlerromane include:
- Hermann Hesse's Demian and Klingsors letzter Sommer
- Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Doktor Faustus
The following are famous English-language Künstlerromane:
- Joyce's 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
- 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
- Art Spiegelman's Maus
- Henry James's Roderick Hudson
Less famous, but stylistically remarkable English-language Künstlerromane include:
- Alasdair Gray's Lanark: A Life in Four Books consists of four books arranged in the order 3, 1, 2, 4; book 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.