Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 - Softcover

Wilson, Edmund

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0020128711 ISBN 13: 9780020128717

Publisher: Collier Books, 1991

Synopsis

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."

About this title

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.

About the Author

Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) was a novelist, memoirist, playwright, journalist, poet, and editor but it is as a literary critic that he is most highly regarded.

Mary Gordon's most recent novel is Spending.

Edition details

• Publisher: Collier Books
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0020128711
• ISBN 13: 9780020128717
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 360