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

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1931. First Edition. Hardcover. Fine/Fine-. First printing (with "A" and Scribner's seal on copyright page) of Wilson's first collection of critical essays, charting the influence of the French Symbolist poets on such revolutionary twentieth-century texts as Joyce's Ulysses and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Crown 8vo (203 x 136mm): [12],319,[1]pp. Publisher's finely woven navy blue cloth, paper spine label printed in black, fore-edge untrimmed; putty grey typographic dust jacket printed in black and priced $2.50. Clamshell case. A truly spectacular example, tightly bound (lightly read, if at all) and spotless throughout. Jacket spine panel darkened a degree or two, else virtually pristine. Modern Movement 71 ("ends with a capital and little known account of the Dada movement by Tristan Tzara"). The introductory essay on Symbolism (tracing its origins in the works of Poe, first translated into French by Baudelaire) is followed by chapters on W. B. Yeats, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Arthur Rimbaud (some of which were first serialized in The New Republic). The appendices include Tristan Tzara's Memoirs of Dadaism and brief excerpts from Joyce's then-untitled forthcoming novel Finnegans Wake. The book's title refers to Count Axël, hero of Auguste, comte de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's long dramatic prose poem published in 1890. Axël "inhabits, in an atmosphere half-Wagnerian, half-romantic-Gothic, an ancient and isolated castle in the depths of the Black Forest. It is because such a person, placed in such a setting, both conceived in the dark labyrinths of the unconscious mind, suggests the essential quality of the literature about which Mr Wilson speaks, that this conception was selected for the title." (from the dust jacket) In 1931, when Axel's Castle was published, Proust was read by only a few in America, and most of the critical articles dealing with Remembrance of Things Past were in French. Ulysses was still unprocurable in the United States (Judge Woolsey's decision permitting its publication was still two years in the future). Matthiessen's The Achievement of T. S. Eliot didn't appear until 1935, and Rimbaud and Valéry were not much read in America (and still are not). Only Yeats was widely appreciated, and and then only his early poems. N. B. With few exceptions (always identified), we only stock books in exceptional condition, with dust jackets carefully preserved in archival, removable mylar sleeves. All orders are packaged with care and posted promptly. Satisfaction guaranteed. (Fine Editions Ltd is a member of the Independent Online Booksellers Association, and we subscribe to its codes of ethics.).