Publisher's Synopsis
The nineteenth-century Künstlerroman self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction-and in doing so, tends toward irony and self-reflection, and prefigures postmodernism. A work of art written about an artist creating a work of art is, in a sense, a novel in which the author is a character. The essays in this collection examine the work of major nineteenth century authors that attempted to merge fiction and reality into a unified whole. These novels paved the way for postmodernists who would use the artist-novel to self-conciously focus on the genre's particular conventions, to parody those conventions in order to accentuate the work's fictionality, and to expose the oppositions between fiction and reality. This collection thus reveals not only material concerns, but the underlying anxieties, drives, and joys, which are so profoundly linked to the creative process.
