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." |
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... Elia persona 20 3 Of Ledgers and Lexicons Elia's lean annuitant and seraphic doctor 37 4 Of Benchers and Magi Elia's old man under the mantle 55 5 Of Pigs and Friends Elia's old glutton and drowning bard 74 6 Of Cards and China Elia's ...
... Elia persona enclosed the memory of September 22 , 1796 , that moment of primal horror seemingly imported direct from ... Elia's essays . Elia is the result of Lamb's having confronted an emotional catastrophe and turned 1. Of Art and ...
... Elia's conception in “ The Londoner " and his birth in " The South - Sea House , " an eigh- teen years ' gestation transpired . During this period of literary trial and error , the closest approach to Elia came in the 1810- 11 Reflector ...
... Elia reflect the undogmatic and skeptical processes of Lamb's idiosyncratic mind . They are , says Phil - Elia ... Elia's essays never fall heir to any wholly authoritative principle of ordering . If the essays at times seem to be ...
... Elia also , this analytic power of speculative reason produces drab , dead- ened realities without any imaginative ... Elia's essays are compared with the poems of his contempora- ries , Wordsworth and Coleridge , they appear to be sly ...