The Artist Hero in the Late 19th Century Novella

Abstract

This paper addresses one of the most representative genres of the 19th century: the Künstlerroman (which developed at the same time the novel was imposing itself as the most prominent literary genre). The article provides an overview of the main narrative forms the Künstlerroman used, which are often differentiated based on their extension. Despite its German origins, the generic form also known as “artist’s novel” flourished as well in the most important European literatures. Because of this, influential iterations of the genre were produced in the Hispanic tradition, which by the end of the century was a complex and rich context. In the article, a comparison between a long realist novel (El doctor Centeno by Benito Pérez Galdós), a much shorter postromantic novel (Confesiones de un pianista by Justo Sierra), and a modernist short story (“El pájaro azul” by Rubén Darío) is made in order to propose a compendious explanation of the artist as a literary figure in the different literatures that form the Hispanic tradition, in the variety of its rhetoric strategies.