Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 [Paperback]

Edmund Wilson (Author), Mary Gordon (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 26, 2004

Published in 1931, Axel's Castle was Edmund Wilson's first book of literary criticism--a landmark book that explores the evolution of the French Symbolist movement and considers its influence on six major twentieth-century writers: William Butler Yeats, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. As Alfred Kazin later wrote, "Wilson was an original, an extraordinary literary artist . . . He could turn any literary subject back into the personal drama it had been for the writer."

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

If great writers are hard to find, then it's safe to say great literary critics are as rare as wild white tigers who can juggle plates. Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) was one of America's most important critics, and Axel's Castle was the book that put him on the map. Few people outside graduate school read serious literary criticism, but a look into Wilson's intense thought and clear prose makes you wonder why the genre has been neglected. If you're a lover of the Modernist writers--Wilson looks specifically at Joyce, Proust, Yeats, Valery, Eliot, Stein, and Rimbaud here--then you'll enjoy Axel's Castle. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

Book of critical essays by Edmund Wilson, published in 1931. Subtitled "A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930," the book traced the origins of specific trends in contemporary literature, which, Wilson held, was largely concerned with Symbolism and its relationship to naturalism. Wilson followed his introductory essay on Symbolism with essays that trace the development of these trends in the works of W.B. Yeats, Paul Valery, T.S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Arthur Rimbaud and Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. -- The Merriam-Webster Encylopedia of Literature --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (August 26, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374529272
• ISBN-13: 978-0374529277
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #982,927 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Introduction to Modern Literature via Symbolism, December 21, 2004

By 

Sherringford Clark (Mayor's Income, Tennessee) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 (Paperback)

_Axel's Castle_ provides a wonderful introduction to modern literature and its sources in the Symbolist movement. However, the book is a bit uneven, and some writers garner more attention than others; Stein gets only about ten pages. It is clear that Wilson views Joyce and Proust as the two most significant modern writers, and those two chapters are accordingly the most insightful of the book and worth the price of the entire volume. In addition, the book will introduce most readers to the deservedly obscure Villiers de L'Isle Adam and may impel them to read _Axel_. Perhaps the latter volume will someday return to print now that Wilson's first work of literary criticism has finally done so. If you are at all interested in any of these authors or the Symbolist movement, this book is essential as Wilson is one of the foremost literary critics of the century, and this is perhaps his most representative and greatest work.

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Boxes, drawers, and labels, June 15, 2008

By 

H. Schneider "Hamlet" (Pandistan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 (Paperback)

This collection of essays was published in 1931. It is available as a separate publication, and also included in Volume 1 of the LoA edition of E.Wilson, who was one of America's most important literary critics in the 30s to 50s. I knew him initially mainly due to his relationship with Nabokov, which is summarized in an entertaining letter collection: Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya.
In Axel's Castle, Wilson tells us the history of fiction and poetry since 1870 with a focus on 'schools'. In broad strokes: Romanticism had been born as a rebellion of the individual and disorder against the orderliness of Neo-classicism. With the growth of science during the 19th, the reaction against the romantic school was Naturalism, which in turn provoked Symbolism as the extrapolation of the romantic rebellion. EW claims that all relevant literature up to the time of his publication could be put in either the Symbolist drawer, or the Naturalist one, or they were syntheses of both.
That may all very well be the case, but I find it rather uninteresting. What is interesting is the individual writer, not any school that brought him/her forth.
The essays cover specifically Yeats, Valery, Eliot, Proust, Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Villiers de L'Isle Adam and Rimbaud. Not to forget the road from Stein to Dada via plain nonsense.
I think that no writer who needs a label for his characterization has been really great. The most interesting essays in the collection are therefore those on Proust and Joyce. Unfortunately, EW tried to squeeze them into his bed of Procrustes, but that notwithstanding, the discussions of La Recherche and of Ulysses are making this volume worth while. They add to our understanding and are helpful if you have a basic knowledge of the two monster books already. If not, they give you a good starting point.
And then, EW tries to tell us that Proust reflects the new theories just developed by Einstein & Co. That the changing light, in which the protagonists in the Recherche appear over time, is exemplifying for us the theory of relativity. What crap.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A major statement defining 'modern Literature', August 24, 2006

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 (Paperback)

To find in modern Literature a motion toward the idealistic and aesthetic, towards what Wilson calls the Symbolic is a unifying theme of this work. In the words of the critic William Troy the technique of Symbolism means for Wilson , "

"Symbolism represents the effort to communicate, by means of a unique personal language, ideas, feelings and sensations more faithfully than they are rendered through the conventional and universal language of ordinary literature. The function of this language is "to intimate things rather than state them plainly"; it depends on suggestion rather than statement. "

Wilson analyzes the symbolic work of Yeats, Paul Valery, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Proust and Joyce.
He brings together the names which brought about the great modernist revolution in Literature, the new way of seeing things which in some sense corresponded with the Cubist revolution of Braque - Picasso and the non- total revolution of Schoenberg.
Wilson is a great reader and provides the first real guide to many of the works which today are considered 'classics'.
One may not always agree with him, but he is always interesting, provocative, alive.
And in his ability to make us see works in a new way he is one of the supreme literary critics of the twentieth century.