SOURCE: Houston, Gail Turley. “Gender Construction and the Künstlerroman: David Copperfield and Aurora Leigh.” Philological Quarterly 72, no. 2 (spring 1993): 213-36.

In the following essay, Houston tries to differentiate between Victorian gender construction in male and female authored English künstlerromane by using Charles Dickens's David Copperfield and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh as a basis for the comparison.

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A nineteenth-century Romantic genre, the Kunstlerroman, as a kind of palimpsest, conceals the material concerns of the writer by asserting that self-making is an art. Indeed, a rewriting and erasure of the self, the Kunstlerroman's conscious project displays a stabilized and authorized reading of the writer, and conceals the eruptive, unstable, and unconscious process of that construction. Furthermore, this generic form makes claims that it is representative of everyman at the same time that it formulates a special and lucrative category for the writer as artistic genius. Kunstlerromane such...