It is difficult to define with a simple term the James Joyce´s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young

Man. While some scholars as Parrinder express their nature as a formation, personal development or
coming-of-age novel and typify it as a Bildungsroman novel; other as Levin (47) classify it in the
Künstlerroman genre, and others highlight its biographical nature or, even more specifically,
denominate it a pseudo-autobiography.

However, it may be affirmed that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a

Bildungsroman novel that evolves in a Künstlerroman one. The term Bildungsroman is used
to refer to those novels that concentrate on the psychological, moral or social development of
a central character. It works as Bildungsroman has become a kind of umbrella term for a
novel of formation, a novel of education, or a coming-of-age story. This genre was
introduced in 1820’s by the German philologist Karl Morgenstern, spreading its uses when it
was applied by Wilhelm Dilthey who considered that the first novel that initiated the genre
was the novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s,
published in 1795.

The Künstlerroman novels deal specifically with the growth of an artist from childhood to
maturity and the recognition of his/her artistic destiny. Thus the Künstlerroman can be seen
as an “extension” of the more traditional Bildungsroman.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man presents the Bildungsroman characteristics,

especially in the first chapters, in which the novel revolves around a clear protagonist,
focusing in tracking the personal growth of Stephen Dedalus until when he builds his own
self-awareness and becomes owner of his own destiny. In this process of coming-of-age,
formal education plays an important role but even moe important are his religious, social and
sexual experiences in his personal growing.

But from a point, when Stephen realises that his religious vocation has been replaced by
something else in the fourth chapter, the text starts to be more concerned of the appearance of
the Stephen artist. As the narrative progresses, Bildungsroman genre starts to weaken and is
relieved by the Künstlerroman, focusing in aspects as the commitment of the artist, or his
isolation from society.

In this way we could also describe this novel as the narration of a religious vocation
transformed into an artistic vocation, the story of a lost faith, of abandoned beliefs, of a child
who wants to believe in the God that adults show him, but when he becomes man, he will
forever deny that will, to transpose all his faith into another very different divinity, that of art.