47-403: Edmund Wilson Jr. (May 8, 1895 – June 12, 1972) was an American writer, literary critic and journalist. He is widely regarded as one of the most important literary critics of the 20th century. Wilson began his career as a journalist, writing for publications such as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker . He helped to edit The New Republic , served as chief book critic for The New Yorker , and
94-405: A Germanic princess. After an initial conflict they fall in love. They speak of the amazing journeys they plan to have. But they realize that life will never measure up to their dreams. They then commit suicide. Axël was the work Villiers considered his masterpiece, although critical opinion has often been reluctant to agree with him, placing far higher value on his fiction. Villiers began work on
141-537: A form of hermeneutics : knowledge via interpretation to understand the meaning of human texts and symbolic expressions – including the interpretation of texts which themselves interpret other texts. In the British and American literary establishment, the New Criticism was more or less dominant until the late 1960s. Around that time Anglo-American university literature departments began to witness
188-659: A result of competitive militarization against the Soviet Union , the civil liberties of Americans were being paradoxically infringed under the guise of defense from Communism. For those reasons, Wilson also opposed involvement in the Vietnam War . Selected by John F. Kennedy to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom , Wilson, in absentia, was officially awarded the medal on December 6, 1963, by President Lyndon Johnson . However, Wilson's view of Johnson
235-617: A rise of a more explicitly philosophical literary theory , influenced by structuralism , then post-structuralism , and other kinds of Continental philosophy . It continued until the mid-1980s, when interest in "theory" peaked. Many later critics, though undoubtedly still influenced by theoretical work, have been comfortable simply interpreting literature rather than writing explicitly about methodology and philosophical presumptions. Today, approaches based in literary theory and continental philosophy largely coexist in university literature departments, while conventional methods, some informed by
282-536: A young nobleman distantly related to Sara. Axël's cousin Kaspar has learnt that a vast treasure is buried near the castle. He tries to persuade Axël to help him look for it but Axël refuses, the two quarrel and Axël kills Kaspar in a duel. In the third act, Axël's Rosicrucian tutor, Master Janus, prepares to initiate Axël into the occult mysteries. He asks his pupil whether he is ready to accept "light, hope and life", and Axël replies "no". In Act Four, Axël decides to leave
329-471: Is a matter of some controversy. For example, The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism draws no distinction between literary theory and literary criticism, and almost always uses the terms together to describe the same concept. Some critics consider literary criticism a practical application of literary theory, because criticism always deals directly with particular literary works, while theory may be more general or abstract. Literary criticism
376-541: Is also well known for his heavy criticism of J. R. R. Tolkien 's The Lord of the Rings , which he referred to as "juvenile trash", saying "Dr. Tolkien has little skill at narrative and no instinct for literary form." He had earlier dismissed the work of W. Somerset Maugham in vehement terms (without, as he later boasted, having troubled to read the novels generally regarded as Maugham's finest, Of Human Bondage , Cakes and Ale and The Razor's Edge ). In 1964, Wilson
423-594: Is often published in essay or book form. Academic literary critics teach in literature departments and publish in academic journals , and more popular critics publish their reviews in broadly circulating periodicals such as The Times Literary Supplement , The New York Times Book Review , The New York Review of Books , the London Review of Books , the Dublin Review of Books , The Nation , Bookforum , and The New Yorker . Literary criticism
470-469: Is set in Germany in 1828 and opens on Christmas Eve in the convent of Saint Apollodora, where the rich heiress Sara de Maupers is just about to take the veil . But when the archdeacon asks Sara whether she is ready to accept "light, hope and life", she replies "no". The religious authorities attempt to imprison Sara, but she manages to flee. The rest of the drama takes place in the castle of Axël d'Auersperg,
517-428: Is the study, evaluation , and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory , which is the philosophical analysis of literature's goals and methods. Although the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists. Whether or not literary criticism should be considered a separate field of inquiry from literary theory
SECTION 10
#1732772847768564-686: Is thought to have existed as far back as the classical period. In the 4th century BC Aristotle wrote the Poetics , a typology and description of literary forms with many specific criticisms of contemporary works of art. Poetics developed for the first time the concepts of mimesis and catharsis , which are still crucial in literary studies. Plato 's attacks on poetry as imitative, secondary, and false were formative as well. The Sanskrit Natya Shastra includes literary criticism on ancient Indian literature and Sanskrit drama. Later classical and medieval criticism often focused on religious texts, and
611-659: The Coal War in Harlan County , with Mary Heaton Vorse and Malcolm Cowley he was run out of Kentucky by nightriders. In 1932, Wilson pledged his support to the Communist Party USA 's candidate for president, William Z. Foster , signing a manifesto in support of CPUSA policies; however, Wilson did not identify personally as a communist. In his book To the Finland Station (1940), Wilson traced
658-657: The Dewey Commission that set out to fairly evaluate the charges that led to the exile of Leon Trotsky . He wrote plays, poems, and novels, but his greatest influence was literary criticism. Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 (1931) was a sweeping survey of Symbolism . It covered Arthur Rimbaud , Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (author of Axël ), W. B. Yeats , Paul Valéry , T. S. Eliot , Marcel Proust , James Joyce , and Gertrude Stein . In 1931, monitoring
705-657: The First World War . His family's summer home at Talcottville, New York , known as Edmund Wilson House , was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. Wilson was the managing editor of Vanity Fair in 1920 and 1921, and later served as associate editor of The New Republic and as a book reviewer for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books . His works influenced novelists Upton Sinclair , John Dos Passos , Sinclair Lewis , Floyd Dell , and Theodore Dreiser . He served on
752-744: The New Critics , also remain active. Disagreements over the goals and methods of literary criticism, which characterized both sides taken by critics during the "rise" of theory, have declined. Some critics work largely with theoretical texts, while others read traditional literature; interest in the literary canon is still great, but many critics are also interested in nontraditional texts and women's literature , as elaborated on by certain academic journals such as Contemporary Women's Writing , while some critics influenced by cultural studies read popular texts like comic books or pulp / genre fiction . Ecocritics have drawn connections between literature and
799-462: The history of the book is a field of interdisciplinary inquiry drawing on the methods of bibliography , cultural history , history of literature , and media theory . Principally concerned with the production, circulation, and reception of texts and their material forms, book history seeks to connect forms of textuality with their material aspects. Among the issues within the history of literature with which book history can be seen to intersect are:
846-500: The 9th century, notably by Al-Jahiz in his al-Bayan wa-'l-tabyin and al-Hayawan , and by Abdullah ibn al-Mu'tazz in his Kitab al-Badi . The literary criticism of the Renaissance developed classical ideas of unity of form and content into literary neoclassicism , proclaiming literature as central to culture, entrusting the poet and the author with preservation of a long literary tradition. The birth of Renaissance criticism
893-549: The American Civil War in Patriotic Gore (1962)." Wilson also authored a novel, I Thought of Daisy (1929) and a collection of short stories, Memoirs of Hecate County (1946). He was a friend of many notable figures, including F. Scott Fitzgerald , Ernest Hemingway , John Dos Passos and Vladimir Nabokov . His dream for a Library of America series of national classic works came to fruition through
940-466: The Enlightenment theoreticians so that the business of Enlightenment became a business with the Enlightenment. This development – particularly of emergence of entertainment literature – was addressed through an intensification of criticism. Many works of Jonathan Swift , for instance, were criticized including his book Gulliver's Travels , which one critic described as "the detestable story of
987-548: The Yahoos". The British Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century introduced new aesthetic ideas to literary studies, including the idea that the object of literature need not always be beautiful, noble, or perfect, but that literature itself could elevate a common subject to the level of the sublime . German Romanticism , which followed closely after the late development of German classicism , emphasized an aesthetic of fragmentation that can appear startlingly modern to
SECTION 20
#17327728477681034-778: The age of 44) from a heart attack in December 1940, Wilson edited two books by Fitzgerald ( The Last Tycoon and The Crack-Up ) for posthumous publication, donating his editorial services to help Fitzgerald's family. Wilson was also a friend of Nabokov, with whom he corresponded extensively and whose writing he introduced to Western audiences. However, their friendship was marred by Wilson's cool reaction to Nabokov's Lolita and irretrievably damaged by Wilson's public criticism of what he considered Nabokov's eccentric translation of Pushkin 's Eugene Onegin . Wilson had multiple marriages and affairs. He wrote many letters to Anaïs Nin , criticizing her for her surrealistic style, because it
1081-514: The author's psychology or biography, which became almost taboo subjects) or reader response : together known as Wimsatt and Beardsley's intentional fallacy and affective fallacy . This emphasis on form and precise attention to "the words themselves" has persisted, after the decline of these critical doctrines themselves. In 1957 Northrop Frye published the influential Anatomy of Criticism . In his works Frye noted that some critics tend to embrace an ideology, and to judge literary pieces on
1128-522: The basis of their adherence to such ideology. This has been a highly influential viewpoint among modern conservative thinkers. E. Michael Jones, for example, argues in his Degenerate Moderns that Stanley Fish was influenced by his own adulterous affairs to reject classic literature that condemned adultery. Jürgen Habermas , in Erkenntnis und Interesse [1968] ( Knowledge and Human Interests ), described literary critical theory in literary studies as
1175-412: The castle forever and goes down to the crypt to say farewell to the tombs of his ancestors. Here he surprises Sara, who has been led to the castle by an old manuscript which tells of the location of the buried treasure. A door opens and the treasure pours out. Axël and Sara fight, then fall in love. Sara dreams of the glorious future the treasure will bring them but Axël manipulates Sara into believing that
1222-648: The course of European socialism, from the 1824 discovery by Jules Michelet of the ideas of Vico to the 1917 arrival of Vladimir Lenin at the Finland Station of Saint Petersburg to lead the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution . In an essay on the work of horror writer H. P. Lovecraft , "Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous", Wilson condemned Lovecraft's tales as "hackwork". Wilson
1269-604: The development of authorship as a profession, the formation of reading audiences, the constraints of censorship and copyright, and the economics of literary form. Ax%C3%ABl Axël is a drama by French writer Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam , published in 1890. It was influenced by his participation in the Paris Commune , the Gnostic philosophy of Hegel as well as the works of Goethe and Victor Hugo . It begins in an occult castle. The Byronic hero Axël meets
1316-465: The editor-in-chief of the school's literary magazine , The Record . From 1912 to 1916, he was educated at Princeton University , where his friends included F. Scott Fitzgerald and war poet John Allan Wyeth . Wilson began his professional writing career as a reporter for the New York Sun , and served in the army with Base Hospital 36 from Detroit, Michigan, and later as a translator during
1363-691: The efforts of Jason Epstein after Wilson's death. He was a two-time winner of the National Book Award and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. He died in 1972 at age 77. Wilson was born in Red Bank, New Jersey . His parents were Edmund Wilson Sr. , a lawyer who served as New Jersey Attorney General , and Helen Mather (née Kimball). Wilson attended The Hill School , a college preparatory boarding school in Pottstown, Pennsylvania , graduating in 1912. At Hill, Wilson served as
1410-406: The first full-fledged crisis in modernity of the core critical-aesthetic principles inherited from classical antiquity , such as proportion, harmony, unity, decorum , that had long governed, guaranteed, and stabilized Western thinking about artworks. Although Classicism was very far from spent as a cultural force, it was to be gradually challenged by a rival movement, namely Baroque, that favoured
1457-406: The more controversial criteria of the author's religious beliefs. These critical reviews were published in many magazines, newspapers, and journals. The commercialization of literature and its mass production had its downside. The emergent literary market, which was expected to educate the public and keep them away from superstition and prejudice, increasingly diverged from the idealistic control of
Edmund Wilson - Misplaced Pages Continue
1504-399: The natural sciences. Darwinian literary studies studies literature in the context of evolutionary influences on human nature. And postcritique has sought to develop new ways of reading and responding to literary texts that go beyond the interpretive methods of critique . Many literary critics also work in film criticism or media studies . Related to other forms of literary criticism,
1551-650: The new direction taken in the early twentieth century. Early in the century the school of criticism known as Russian Formalism , and slightly later the New Criticism in Britain and in the United States, came to dominate the study and discussion of literature in the English-speaking world. Both schools emphasized the close reading of texts, elevating it far above generalizing discussion and speculation about either authorial intention (to say nothing of
1598-508: The piece around 1869 and had still not put the finishing touches to it when he died. It was first published posthumously in 1890. The play is heavily influenced by the Romantic theatre of Victor Hugo , as well as Goethe 's Faust and the music dramas of Richard Wagner . The last time it was staged was during the year 2006 in Québec and Montréal, directed by Christian Lapointe. The scene
1645-447: The reader of English literature, and valued Witz – that is, "wit" or "humor" of a certain sort – more highly than the serious Anglophone Romanticism. The late nineteenth century brought renown to authors known more for their literary criticism than for their own literary work, such as Matthew Arnold . However important all of these aesthetic movements were as antecedents, current ideas about literary criticism derive almost entirely from
1692-416: The several long religious traditions of hermeneutics and textual exegesis have had a profound influence on the study of secular texts. This was particularly the case for the literary traditions of the three Abrahamic religions : Jewish literature , Christian literature and Islamic literature . Literary criticism was also employed in other forms of medieval Arabic literature and Arabic poetry from
1739-613: The transgressive and the extreme, without laying claim to the unity, harmony, or decorum that supposedly distinguished both nature and its greatest imitator, namely ancient art. The key concepts of the Baroque aesthetic, such as " conceit ' ( concetto ), " wit " ( acutezza , ingegno ), and " wonder " ( meraviglia ), were not fully developed in literary theory until the publication of Emanuele Tesauro 's Il Cannocchiale aristotelico (The Aristotelian Telescope) in 1654. This seminal treatise – inspired by Giambattista Marino 's epic Adone and
1786-535: The work of the Spanish Jesuit philosopher Baltasar Gracián – developed a theory of metaphor as a universal language of images and as a supreme intellectual act, at once an artifice and an epistemologically privileged mode of access to truth. In the Enlightenment period (1700s–1800s), literary criticism became more popular. During this time literacy rates started to rise in the public; no longer
1833-1116: Was a Fellow on the faculty in the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University . Throughout his career, Wilson often answered fan mail and outside requests for his time with this form postcard: "Edmund Wilson regrets that it is impossible for him to: Read manuscripts, write articles or books to order, write forewords or introductions, make statements for publicity purposes, do any kind of editorial work, judge literary contests, give interviews, conduct educational courses, deliver lectures, give talks or make speeches, broadcast or appear on television, take part in writers' congresses, answer questionnaires, contribute to or take part in symposiums or 'panels' of any kind, contribute manuscripts for sales, donate copies of his books to libraries, autograph books for strangers, allow his name to be used on letterheads, supply personal information about himself, supply photographs of himself, supply opinions on literary or other subjects". Literary critic A genre of arts criticism , literary criticism or literary studies
1880-600: Was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books . His notable works include Axel's Castle (1931), described by Joyce Carol Oates as "a groundbreaking study of modern literature." Oates writes that Wilson "encroached fearlessly on areas reserved for academic 'experts': early Christianity in The Dead Sea Scrolls (1955), native American civilization in Apologies to the Iroquois (1960), and
1927-583: Was also an outspoken critic of US Cold War policies. He refused to pay his federal income tax from 1946 to 1955 and was later investigated by the Internal Revenue Service . After a settlement, Wilson received a $ 25,000 fine, rather than the original $ 69,000 sought by the IRS. He received no jail time. In his book The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest (1963), Wilson argued that as
Edmund Wilson - Misplaced Pages Continue
1974-665: Was awarded The Edward MacDowell Medal by The MacDowell Colony for outstanding contributions to American culture. Wilson lobbied for the creation of a series of classic U.S. literature similar to France's Bibliothèque de la Pléiade . In 1982, ten years after his death, The Library of America series was launched. Wilson's writing was included in the Library of America in two volumes published in 2007. Wilson's critical works helped foster public appreciation for several novelists: Ernest Hemingway , John Dos Passos , William Faulkner , F. Scott Fitzgerald , and Vladimir Nabokov . He
2021-529: Was decidedly negative. Historian Eric F. Goldman writes in his memoir The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson that when Goldman, on behalf of Johnson, invited Wilson to read from his writings at a White House Festival of the Arts in 1965, "Wilson declined with a brusqueness that I never experienced before or after in the case of an invitation in the name of the President and First Lady." For the academic year 1964–65, he
2068-434: Was in 1498, with the recovery of classic texts, most notably, Giorgio Valla 's Latin translation of Aristotle 's Poetics . The work of Aristotle, especially Poetics , was the most important influence upon literary criticism until the late eighteenth century. Lodovico Castelvetro was one of the most influential Renaissance critics who wrote commentaries on Aristotle's Poetics in 1570. The seventeenth-century witnessed
2115-452: Was instrumental in establishing the modern evaluation of the works of Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling . Wilson was a friend of the novelist and playwright Susan Glaspell as well as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin . He attended Princeton with Fitzgerald, a year-and-a-half his junior. In 1936 in the "Crack-Up" essays , Fitzgerald referred to Wilson as his "intellectual conscience ... [f]or twenty years". After Fitzgerald's early death (at
2162-417: Was opposed to the realism that was then deemed correct writing, and he ended by asking for her hand — "I would love to be married to you, and I would teach you to write" — which she took as an insult. Except for a brief falling-out following the publication of I Thought of Daisy , in which Wilson portrayed Edna St. Vincent Millay as Rita Cavanaugh, Wilson and Millay remained friends throughout life. Wilson
2209-407: Was reading exclusive for the wealthy or scholarly. With the rise of the literate public, the swiftness of printing and commercialization of literature, criticism arose too. Reading was no longer viewed solely as educational or as a sacred source of religion; it was a form of entertainment. Literary criticism was influenced by the values and stylistic writing, including clear, bold, precise writing and
#767232