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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... illusory timelessness . If the human condition typified an inauthentic or " allegorical " unreality , then the sym- bol , entangled as it is within a divine reality , promised to res- cue man from his moribund selfhood . Yet the hallmark.
... illusion . But the one thing the Urn knows on earth is that " Beauty is truth , truth beauty . " If one takes Keats ... illusory shadowland devoid of truth ! But this brings round the original question : what becomes of the equation of ...
... illusory shadows — and , thus , finding his own fate in the hands and on the knees of the gods , closes with the tangential observation that undoubtedly " Abt Vogler " was in- spired by the death of Browning's wife . " There , right ...
... imagination under certain circumstances . Although in " Elegiac Stanzas " the su- premacy of the poetic imagination is questioned by Words- worth as a " fond illusion , " the predominant 16 Confessions of a Prosaic Dreamer.
Charles Lamb's Art of Autobiography Gerald Monsman. worth as a " fond illusion , " the predominant note of Words- worth's metaphysics is faith in the possibility of reproducing privileged " spots of time . " The predominant note of ...