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

Published in 1931,Axel's Castlewas 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 Valeacute;ry, 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." Edmund Wilson(1895-1972) was a memoirist, playwright, journalist, poet, and editor, but it is as a literary critic that he is most highly regarded. Originally published in 1931,Axel's Castlewas Edmund Wilson's first book of literary criticisma landmark work that explored the evolution of the Symbolist movement and its relationship to naturalism. With his signature clarity of style, Wilson examines the concurrent influences on six major twentieth-century writers: William Butler Yeats, Paul Valeacute;ry, 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 personal drama it had been for the writer." "It is precisely Wilson's skill at narrative and drama, his ability to make these writers not distant iconic figures but familiars, that makeAxel's Castlesuch an enjoyable book of literary criticism . . . [Wilson] uses the fiction writer's skills to make his artists breathe."from the Introduction by Mary Gordon "[Axel's Castlewas] the first informed study of some of the most important Modernist writers. At the same time, it set out with impressive authority their influences and precedents . . . ThroughoutAxel's Castle, we not only feel the breadth of Wilson's learning and the pressure of his judgments, we follow the articulate sense-making motions of a mind bent upon synthesis, which are manifest sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase. Even in his early work Wilson possessed his trademark sureness of instinct, never bulldozing some sharp local insight to the side on behalf of the march of his ideas. Style and thought have already merged into elegancethere is not a crooked seam in the book."Sven Birkerts,The American Scholar

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.