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sherwoodreads 's review for:
Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930
by Edmund Wilson
It's fascinating on so many levels. I first read it in the late seventies, as part of my "alien minds" project--to try to see through the eyes of minds utterly unlike mine, but with one sharing point (after I made an attempt with the Marquis de Sade, and was just repulsed, but I do not like horror). In this case, the touch point--I thought--was fantasy.
The full title includes the phrase "Imaginative Literature" but Wilson's six writers are not who I would have chosen to represent fantasy. I was actually glad--I wanted to learn what it was he saw worthwhile in Stein, for instance. I loved reports of what she said in the salons of Paris, but her writing was (and still is, to my eye) turgid and impenetrable.
I never bought the Symbolist movement--it seemed more self-consciously "Here I am so great" and pompously "art for the sake of art" than all the elite the expats scorned. Yet they were trying experiments, which I wanted to understand, even if I couldn't appreciate the effect.
Yeats I did come to value in later years; what Wilson gave me was a key to understanding, and appreciating, James Joyce.
The full title includes the phrase "Imaginative Literature" but Wilson's six writers are not who I would have chosen to represent fantasy. I was actually glad--I wanted to learn what it was he saw worthwhile in Stein, for instance. I loved reports of what she said in the salons of Paris, but her writing was (and still is, to my eye) turgid and impenetrable.
I never bought the Symbolist movement--it seemed more self-consciously "Here I am so great" and pompously "art for the sake of art" than all the elite the expats scorned. Yet they were trying experiments, which I wanted to understand, even if I couldn't appreciate the effect.
Yeats I did come to value in later years; what Wilson gave me was a key to understanding, and appreciating, James Joyce.