ABSTRACT
This essay speculates on the ways in which Lamb’s essays seek to detach themselves from, or at any rate to resist absorption by, the particular circumstances of the London Magazine to which they nonetheless remain tied. Lamb draws out of periodical publishing an identity that disguises the commercial nature of that enterprise, and then seeks to elude the concretion, the historical embedding, of that identity. The name of this double process is Elia, and it is the workings of this persona that mark the unsettled situation of the text.
