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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... absence of any explicit narra- tive of that pivotal " day of horrors " ( 1:43 ) which nevertheless everywhere informs the contours of Elia's essays . Elia is the result of Lamb's having confronted an emotional catastrophe and turned 1 ...
... absent from the essays of Elia may be owing not solely , then , to Lamb's desire to spare Mary's feelings ; certainly Lamb ... absence play a figurative role in which her murder symbolizes the loss of any imaginative power to synthesize ...
... absence of any rational control engenders the insane distortions and visionary , frenzied egoism of the poi- soned well of consciousness , a grotesque parody of the imagi- nation . For Lamb , the “ watchful Bruin " who has been stabbed ...
... absence in terms of the specter of the old man . In this , the essays do differ from the letters by their higher degree of self - consciousness , imagis- tic complexity , and stylistic premeditation - the product of their structure of ...
... absent original whole- ness . This paradoxically idealized but limping alter ego be- comes the voice that frees his guilty self from the fallenness of time and space in order that he may cry out from the depths of his self ...