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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... to man . " et cetera ? Silence and slow time have come now to the classroom . Suspicious looks seem to accuse the professor of deviously con- spiring to deprive said stalwart gentlemen of the Easy B. 4 / Confessions of a Prosaic Dreamer.
... seems the unavoidable answer to art's de- struction : There shall never be one lost good ! What was , shall live as before ; The evil is null , is naught , is silence implying sound ; What was good shall be good , with , for evil , so ...
... seems to accept the professor's attribution to Yeats of this denigration of life in time . History for Yeats , then , is but a play or a Platonic shadowland ; events are enacted over and over without ultimate meaning . Even the artwork ...
... seems to call perfection into being . She wants to know if , perhaps , the realm of the Spirit might not depend for ... seem now that Vogler's circle must be a product of the arcs in the same way that the harmony of Yeats ' design is a ...
... seem either oddly mystical , as if Cole- ridge and Carlyle are being mouthed anew , or , in some theo- reticians ( graduates in composition from the Grand Academy of Lagado , one might suppose ) , confused and inarticulate . As sharply ...