Axel's Castle

{{Short description|1931 book by Edmund Wilson}}{{Infobox book

| pub_date = 1931

| name = Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930

}}

Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 is a 1931 book of literary criticism by Edmund Wilson on the Symbolist movement in literature.

It includes a brief overview of the movement's origins and chapters on W. B. Yeats, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein.

The appendices include Tristan Tzara's Memoirs of Dadaism and excerpts from Joyce's then-untitled forthcoming novel Finnegans Wake.

Serialization

Some of the book's chapters were first serialized in The New Republic.

The book's title refers to Axël, a play by Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam which is discussed along with the works of Arthur Rimbaud in the concluding chapter.

[https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/23/home/wilson-castle.html New York Times on Axel's Castle]
[https://archive.today/20130415133749/http://eic.oxfordjournals.org/content/61/3/275.short?rss=1 Oxford Journal on Axel's Castle]
[https://archive.org/details/axelscastle030404mbp Axel's Castle at Internet Archive]