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Article: Gender construction and the 'Kunstlerroman': 'David Copperfield' and 'Aurora Leigh.'
- Article from:
- Philological Quarterly
- Article date:
- March 22, 1993
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1993 University of Iowa. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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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 as Wordsworth's Prelude, Thackeray's Pendennis, Tennyson's In ...