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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... for Lamb's is a style sensitive to the precise value of words , a style that often pressed words that have become mainly figu- rative back into their literal , etymological root meanings . 44 Confessions of a Prosaic Dreamer.
Charles Lamb's Art of Autobiography Gerald Monsman. rative back into their literal , etymological root meanings . “ Su- perfoetation " suggests , then , a pregnancy on top of a preg- nancy , but in which there is no birth , no bringing ...
... own name - no re- flection of the Agnus Dei , he . Lamb enshrines his pun both in the generic mockery of the essay's form and in the literal data of autobiography : a pastoral ( from the Latin 76 / Confessions of a Prosaic Dreamer.
... literal fact and the literal mind that “ stops a metaphor " like a traitor or spy , lies that " border - land " of " em- bryo conceptions " in which Elia aspires to dwell . In both " Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist " and " Old China ...
... literal- minded about the imaginative - aesthetic world — something Elia cannot be . " She loved the quadrate , or square ; . . in square games ( she meant whist ) all that is possible to be attained in card - playing is accomplished ...