Künstlerroman
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The title of this article contains the character ü. Where it is unavailable, the name may be represented as Kuenstlerroman.
A Künstlerroman ("artist's novel", German pronunciation: [ˈkʏnstlɐ.roˌmaːn]) 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
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther"
Famous Russian language Kunstlerromane include:
- Vladimir Nabokov's The Gift
The following are famous English-language Künstlerromane:
- Joyce's A 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
- Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse
- 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
- Henry James's Roderick Hudson
- Henry James's The Tragic Muse
- John Fante's "Ask the Dust"
- Wyndham Lewis's "Tarr"
- William Wordsworth's "The Prelude"
- Herman Melville's Pierre: or, The Ambiguities
- Margaret Laurence's The Diviners
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.

