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
Results 1-5 of 18
... meaning in a transcendent or absolutist system of valua- tion , the romantics and , increasingly , the Victorians typically wavered between a commitment to the traditional idea of a time - transcending , eternally complete Absolute and ...
... meaning ; the only dif- ference this time is that the invaders have found a new way to come , by air . As the ludicrous variety of animals compounded with the monotonous repetition of ' back ' implies , history's cycles are ...
... meaning of clerk as a priest ultimately is invoked by Dyer's absence from the body and presence " with the Lord " ( Works , 2:11 ) . The two essays , then , have been generated by Lamb's med- itation on the single word , clerk — a title ...
... meaning ” ( 1 : 321 ) . Elia , of course , will not deny a measure of truth to external appearance ; he acknowledges that he indeed is employed as a clerk : " I confess that it is my humour , my fancy - in the fore- part of the day ...
... ; 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.