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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... face of such fortuitous physical destruction ? How , in short , can it embody Ideal Truth if a clumsy Keats can smash it ? ” After another pause , one student makes a stab in the direc- tion of separating the physical urn from its ...
... face of Eliz- abeth Barrett in the moving lines of the tenth stanza , slips out the door . Sadly , today the papers were due and papers he shall have , as all thirty trample down the hall toward his door after him ! Several weeks later ...
... faces , her straitjacket over his arm.2 “ Our love for each other , " Mary once acknowledged to her friend Sarah Stoddart , “ has been the tor- ment of our lives " ( 2 : 3 ) . More than Lamb himself could ever know , the creation of his ...
... The Wife's Trial , Selby fears to look upon Katherine's face “ Lest I should fancy in its innocent brow / Some strange shame written " ( Works , 5 : 256 ) ; the protagonist of Mr. H— ( fled from in terror 2. Of Men and Angels / 23.
... Faces , " " Dream Children , ” and “ A Character of the late Elia " -find each new year an instance of superfoetation , a begetting without birth that produces not a longed - for innocence but a corpse . In " 2. Of Men and Angels / 35.