Confessions of a Prosaic Dreamer: Charles Lamb's Art of AutobiographyMore than Charles Lamb himself could ever know, the creation of Elia as his personal artistic voice was his way to endure the memories of September 22, 1796, a day of primal horror when his sister Mary in a fit of insanity killed their mother and destroyed the Lamb family. Throughout the rest of his life Lamb was faced with those memories , with deep-seated personal and career disillusionments. Yet through Elia he confronted his inner self to forge the essays that may be considered among the most brilliant and inimitable works in English letters. Gerald Monsman in this study abandons the customary chronological approach to Lamb's life in favor of a more incisive, open-ended discussion of the Elia essays. By a close textual examination of Lamb's language, he relates the essayist's use of symbol and autobiographical concerns. Monsman contends and demonstrates that "as sharply and as pertinently as any artistic voice, Elia, the most celebrated persona in the nineteenth century, focuses the problems inherent in the modern literary imagination." Elia's "textual identity is a function of the author's actual life, of losses and imperfections artistically utilized and harmonized, employed against themselves to produce the rehabilitating symbol." |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 26
... China Elia's old women at whist and tea 90 7 Of Books and Plays Elia's old man in the library and at the theater 109 8 Of Children and Houses Elia's armchair dreamer and artist in the garden 128 PR 4864 MGG 1984 9 Of Time and Eternity ...
... China , " a timeless world on whose surfaces " likeness is iden- tity " and in which the innermost guilty causes and effects of the terrene bios vanish quite . In this world , the daintily minc- ing foot almost completely forgets the ...
... Chinese fall from innocence . But because the prelapsarian Chinese state consisted in eating pigs raw , Bo - bo and Ho - ti have not fallen from any Edenic glory . Often bygone times assume epic pro- portions in Lamb's essays , as the ...
... Chinese law is powerless to keep hidden the forbidden knowledge of roast pig , to preserve the raw meat state of innocence . Bo - bo's burnt fingers , preposterously parodying the pain of a new awareness implicit in a loss of innocence ...
... Chinese Locke who arises to set all to rights ( Lamb satirically transposes characteristics of his contemporary British society to ancient China just as Swift had done in Gulliver's Travels ) represents another instance of comic and ...