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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... Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb , ed . E. V. Lucas , 3 vols . ( New Haven : Yale University Press , 1935 ) , or The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb , ed . E. V. Lucas , 5 vols . ( New York : G. P. Putnam's Sons , 1903 ) ; these ...
... letters and other verse support some such iden- tification , then " beauty " is its material , sensuous , temporal counterpart . The purpose of Keats ' apparent tautology is to af- firm that all that is beautiful coincides with truth ...
... ( Letters , 1:39 ) . With these sad words to his old schoolmate Coleridge , Charles Lamb in effect prefaces his future domestic life , the personal circumstances of which will prove fully as bizarre as that of any English author . The ...
... letters , the starker , more fearsome truths of his own life . The essence of Lamb's persona is the absence of any explicit narra- tive of that pivotal " day of horrors " ( 1:43 ) which nevertheless everywhere informs the contours of ...
... letters , the essays of Elia reflect the undogmatic and skeptical processes of Lamb's idiosyncratic mind . They are , says Phil - Elia , " unlicked , incondite things " ( 2 : 151 ) -crude little bear cubs awaiting their dam to lick them ...