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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... original question : what becomes of the equation of truth and beauty if sensuous beauty is subject to destruction ? Must , heaven forfend , Ideal Truth also then be impermanent ? Can one smash Transcendental Reality like a Greek Jug ...
... original illusion of plenitude without some degree of " superfoetation ” ( 1 : 283 n . 1 ; 2 : 2 , 259 ) ; but by turning the Elia persona back upon the guilty profile of his own life in a transforming and purgative act , Lamb catches ...
... original whole- ness . This paradoxically idealized but limping alter ego be- comes the voice that frees his guilty self from the fallenness of time and space in order that he may cry out from the depths of his self - contradiction and ...
... original sin of my constitution " ( 1 : 124 ) : I lead a weary life , suffering the penalties of guilt for that which was no crime , but only following the blameless dic- tates of nature : . . . that which appetite demands , is set down ...
... original ety- mological 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 ...