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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... becomes of the equation of truth and beauty if sensuous beauty is subject to destruction ? Must , heaven forfend , Ideal Truth also then be impermanent ? Can one smash Transcendental Reality like a Greek Jug ? The professor's self ...
... become for the artist a declaration of the glory of God clearly embodied Browning's own central perception of the meaningfulness of the life of man in time ( tipsy , irreverent , joyous , and sexual ) as the basic sub- ject matter of ...
... become like the two Chinamen , who like actors in a play stare on the ' tragic scene ' with complete detachment . " The class seems to accept the professor's attribution to Yeats of this denigration of life in time . History for Yeats ...
... become the metaphors of his art . In every autobiography the three key elements are autos , the remembering self of ... becomes for Lamb a therapeutic psychic exorcism or ca- tharsis derived from the act of writing itself ; but instead ...
... becomes lame - footed and ultimately loses his leg ; in " Moral and Personal Deformity " the felonious Tomkins " halts in his left leg " ( 1:66 ) ; in " Decay of Beggars " the common cripple is replaced by a minutely described para ...