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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... human life . Not surprisingly , the century encountered increasing difficulty in reconciling its new emphasis upon the density and reality of finite human life with the catastrophic character of life - in - time . From Endymion and the ...
... Human imperfection implies the ideal perfection somewhere in the scheme of things , just as the arc , an unfinished circle and imperfect , implies the presence of a circle by virtue of its definition as a locus of points equidistant ...
... human experience , neither the physical - temporal artifact itself nor human ' woe . ' This symbolic realm of the imagination is precisely what Yeats invokes to answer those ' hysterical women ' who in a time of civil crisis turn upon ...
... human imbecility ; and it went with a lame gait ; but in its goings it exceeded all mortal children in grace and swiftness . . . . And myriads of years rolled round ( in dreams Time is nothing ) , and still it kept , and is to keep ...
... human society and the apocalyptic manifestation of individual pride should have coincided so closely with Lamb's own confessional icon is no mere coincidence of literary history . For each , the mon- strous , reanimated body is that ...