Künstlerroman
A Künstlerroman, 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 and Klingsor's Last Summer
- Thomas Mann's Tonio Kröger, and Doctor Faustus
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 2012–2015 Elena Ferrante's ''Neapolitan Novels''
Icelandic
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''
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
- 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