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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... heads of the students bend to their texts , each finding the 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 ...
... heads of colleges , care less than any body else about these questions . — Con- tented to suck the milky fountains of their Alma Maters , with- out inquiring into the venerable gentlewoman's years , they rather hold such curiosities to ...
... head on my pillow , I suppose , from the fourth to the sev- enth or eighth year of my life - so far as memory serves in things so long ago - without an assurance , which realized its own prophecy , of seeing some frightful spectre . Be ...
... head , who it was I had seen that night : —it was my aunt , and it was not my aunt : -it was that good creature who loved me above all the world , engaged at her good task of de- votions — perhaps praying for some good to me . Again ...
... head to foot " in " A True Story " who nursed the wounded male to health only to discover his mar- riage to another - he , then , being dead to her as if he had really died ( 1 : 329 ) . As with the voyeuristic Coventry , this ...