A Künstlerroman (German pronunciation: [ˈkʏnstlɐ.ʁoˌmaːn]; plural -ane), meaning "artist's novel" in English, is a narrative about an artist's growth to maturity.
It may be classified as a specific subgenre of Bildungsroman; such a work, usually a novel, tends to depict the conflicts of a sensitive youth against the values of a middle and upper class society of his or her time.
Alasdair Gray's Lanark: A Life in Four Books consists of four books arranged in the order 3, 1, 2, 4; books 1 and 2 constituting a Künstlerroman. In John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy, the Camera Eye sections add up to a modernist autobiographical Künstlerroman. John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse is a collection of short stories that are often read as a postmodernist Künstlerroman.