Axel's Castle / The Wound and the Bow
Edmund Wilson · 1931
Wilson was the last great general man of letters in American criticism. He could write about anything with authority and pleasure. His essay criticism invented the template for the thinking person's book review.
The case against
Wilson explains books by retelling them; whole chapters of Axel's Castle are plot summary with a thesis stapled on. The Wound and the Bow rides one Freudian idea, that art grows from injury, well past the point of usefulness. And Axel's Castle closes by declaring the symbolist experiment exhausted just as its influence was getting started.
Essays · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
