Recommendations
Books Like Axël
Best books to read after Axël by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
Readers who respond to Axël's Symbolist idealism, its refusal of reality in favor of the absolute ideal, and Villiers's Rosicrucian framework will find the wider tradition of French Symbolist drama and fiction.
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L'Ève future
by Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
L'Ève future (1886) is the essential companion to Axël in Villiers's work: where Axël treats the opposition between ideal and real in a mystical-Rosicrucian framework (the perfect love, the chosen death), L'Ève future treats it in a technological framework (Thomas Edison's perfect artificial woman), and together they show the full range of Villiers's philosophical theme.
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Contes cruels
by Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
Villiers's 1883 collection of ironic and fantastical tales is the best introduction to his philosophical range: the irony and sardonic wit that Axël's sustained elevation somewhat obscures are fully on display in the Contes, and reading both shows the breadth of Villiers's intelligence.
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Tristan und Isolde
by Richard Wagner
Wagner's music-drama is the direct inspiration for Axël's structure and themes: the love-death (Liebestod) of Axël and Sara is the literary equivalent of Tristan and Isolde's, and Villiers's explicit debts to Wagner show in the drama's four-part structure, its exalted rhetoric, and its treatment of the absolute love that can only be consummated in death.
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À Rebours
by Joris-Karl Huysmans
À Rebours (1884) is the aesthetic equivalent of Axël's philosophical statement: where Axël refuses reality in favor of the mystical ideal, Des Esseintes refuses it in favor of the aesthetic ideal — both protagonists are driven by the same Symbolist conviction that the real world is insufficient to the demands of the fully developed sensibility.
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Bruges-la-Morte
by Georges Rodenbach
Rodenbach's 1892 Symbolist novel shares Axël's consecration of an impossible ideal: where Axël and Sara choose death rather than allowing the ideal to be contaminated by the real, Hugues consecrates his dead wife's memory with the same absolute commitment — both works treat the ideal as sacred and the real as profanation.
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Pelléas et Mélisande
by Maurice Maeterlinck
Maeterlinck's 1892 Symbolist play is the most important theatrical successor to Axël: both are Symbolist dramas about an impossible love in an atmosphere of doom and mystical foreboding, and both were set to music by Debussy (Pelléas et Mélisande, 1902) and Schoenberg (Pelleas und Melisande, 1903), making them the founding texts of Symbolist musical theater.
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The Symbolist Movement in Literature
by Arthur Symons
Symons's 1899 critical study, which introduced the French Symbolist movement to English readers (it is dedicated to W.B. Yeats), is the essential critical companion to Axël: Symons's treatment of Villiers is one of the finest critical accounts of Axël's significance, and his essays on Mallarmé, Verlaine, and Huysmans place Axël in its full aesthetic context.
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The Secret Rose
by W.B. Yeats
Yeats's 1897 collection of mystical tales shows the direct influence of Axël on Irish Symbolism: Yeats was deeply affected by seeing Axël staged in Paris in 1894, and his own treatment of the ideal versus the real, the spiritual versus the material, reflects Villiers's influence throughout his early work.
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