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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... Dyer in " Amicus Redivivus , " or the irrational cravings of the Drunkard ( " Confessions of a Drunk- ard " ) , of Edax ( “ Edax on Appetite " ) , and of Ho - Ti ( “ Disserta- tion Upon Roast Pig " ) , or the obesity of his Gentle ...
... Dyer , who at Oxford is the Chaucerian clerk par excellence . Even the 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 ...
... . In Oxford , emptied by vaca- tion , we find the promise of a metaphysical plenitude , and the desolate South - Sea House becomes another sort of House , with George Dyer as its guide : " when he goes 50 Confessions of a Prosaic Dreamer.
... Dyer- " with G. D. , " says Lamb , “ to be absent from the body , is sometimes ( not to speak it profanely ) to be present with the Lord " ( 2:11 ) -a kind of “ serene and blessed " Wordsworthian figure , laid asleep In body , and ...
... Dyer almost has grown into a book or , given that the book is Johann Scapula's Greek Lexicon , into the language that grounds Western higher culture . More text than mortal , Dyer mediates between the languages of men and the founding ...