SOURCE: Mahlendorf, Ursula R. Introduction to The Wellsprings of Literary Creation: An Analysis of Male and Female “Artist Stories” from the German Romantics to American Writers of the Present, pp. xii-xx. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1985.

In the following introduction to Mahlendorf's book-length examination of the künstlerroman, she surveys the ways in which the künstlerroman can be studied psychologically.

A Künstlernovelle and Künstlerroman (artist story and artist novel) contains the creation of a work of art as a central event of its plot. Based on the creative work and psychology of a fictitious sculptor, painter, poet or musician, “artist stories” have fascinated German authors and readers continuously since the Romantics of the early 19th century.¹ Under German Romantic influence, American writers, beginning with Hawthorne in The Artist of the Beautiful (1844) have shared this fascination. Despite Günther Grass's devastating parody in The Tin Drum...