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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... un- happy termination of his first love affair . Until he died nearly four decades later , Lamb lived with his sister Mary in an at- mosphere described by his actress friend Fanny Kelly , to 12 Confessions of a Prosaic Dreamer.
Charles Lamb's Art of Autobiography Gerald Monsman. mosphere described by his actress friend Fanny Kelly , to whom he unavailingly had proposed , as one of " sad mental uncer- tainty " ( 2 : 256 ) owing to Mary's recurrent attacks ...
... described para- plegic " shuffling his ungainly trunk along in an elaborate and painful motion " ( 2 : 119 ) . There are , in addition , the peculiar gaits of the Old Benchers or such allied impairments as the bencher Mingay's " iron ...
... described in " Witches " or " Ears " ; yet even here the shadow of the earthly bios denies to everyday life its celestial aspirations for a reassuring stability . And the celestial bios , by centering attention on the deficiencies of ...
... described as an " innocent imposture , " was itself an anagrammatic hoax ( “ a lie " ) , destined to rival in the literary sphere the scheme of the South - Sea Bubble whose centenary Lamb is here wryly com- memorating . The appearance ...