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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... reflection of his now absent 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 ...
... reflection of mortal " weakness " or " imbecility " ( L imbecillus , weak ) , Ge - Urania embodies a Wordsworthian metempsychosis in reverse , trailing clouds of mortality back to heaven from earth which is his home . One wonders if the ...
... reflected in other figures : thus in “ Dream Chil- dren " Elia's brother John becomes lame - footed and ultimately loses his leg ; in " Moral and Personal Deformity " the felonious Tomkins " halts in his left leg " ( 1:66 ) ; in " Decay ...
... Reflections in the Pillory , " The Pawnbroker's Daughter ) . Both pillory and gal- lows are public platforms that punish the guilty by making their shame , as Lamb's Pensilis observes , an object of “ general lev- ity . " Speaking of ...
... reflection of his now absent wholeness . But when Lamb begins writing confessional autobiography , his guilt is too immediate and overwhelming to allow him to come close to the contours of his daily life ; his personal anxi- eties ...