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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... temporal and historical structure of human life . Not surprisingly , the century encountered increasing difficulty in reconciling its new emphasis upon the density and reality of finite human life with the catastrophic character of life ...
... temporal counterpart . The purpose of Keats ' apparent tautology is to af- firm that all that is beautiful coincides with truth and that , equally importantly , all truth coincides with beauty . Spiritual truth is not a reality larger ...
... temporal process . In that lecture the pro- fessor had held forth on the Prior's folly in urging Lippo to paint pure soul , like Brother Angelico . Lippo's insistence that the world , far from being a snare , can become for the artist a ...
... temporal artifact itself nor human ' woe . ' This symbolic realm of the imagination is precisely what Yeats invokes to answer those ' hysterical women ' who in a time of civil crisis turn upon artists and musicians . Real men , they say ...
... temporal life , to con- clude : " So , going back to Keats , how can we really say that the true essence of the Grecian Urn's reality lies wholly in some out - of - time realm of the imagination ? In short , can there be circle or any ...