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." |
From inside the book
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... a coherent persona came only with the founding of the London Magazine in 1820. By then Lamb already had published his Collected Works in two formal vol- umes ; and so , ironically , just when the 14 Confessions of a Prosaic Dreamer.
... ironically or trail off , ambiguously unresolved . That the maternal figure is absent from the essays of Elia may be owing not solely , then , to Lamb's desire to spare Mary's feelings ; certainly Lamb acknowledged in his letters that ...
... ironic voice for his oc- casional verse , he sharpens his imagistic and tonal focus to the great improvement of his poetic style . Increasingly distrustful of his emotions , Lamb begins to see even muted introspection as a form of ...
... ironically , under another name ) : " He is also the true Elia whose Essays are extant in a little volume published a year or two since ; and rather better known from that name without a meaning , than from anything he has done or can ...
... ironic introjection of the un- biblical " sleeping . " The Genesis creation , an effoliation of color , variety , and brilliance , is that archetypal moment of origin within the past in which for once the " nothing " that is antiquity ...