A comparative approach to the künstlerroman: Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man and Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise

This thesis analyzes the presumably German sub-genre called the künstlerroman through a comparison of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise. As a literary form that is known to deal with the evolution and formation of an artistic individual, often the protagonist, these two modernist novels play important roles due to their various similarities and differences in the portrayal of their artists. By comparing an accepted sample of the form, which would be Joyce's A Portrait, and a sample that is heavily altered by its historic and artistic context, Fitzgerald's Paradise, this research focuses on the künstlerroman's origin and its portrayal to shed light on the form's standards and expectations. Through this comparison, this thesis questions the qualities that help Joyce's novel become such a highly accepted example of the form and what qualities Fitzgerald's Paradise have to be such an altered example. While the research on the bildungsroman has grown a lot through the years, especially thanks to the popularity of the genre, the künstlerroman has often been overshadowed in both research and in fiction. Coupled with the difficulties in genre studies in general, this study aims to fill the lack of certain research on the nature of künstlerroman.