Luigi Capuana: Experimental Fiction and Cultural Mediation in Post-Risorgimento Italy

Brian Zuccala, Annamaria Pagliaro

Description

Luigi Capuana: Experimental Fiction and Cultural Mediation in Post-Risorgimento Italy. The studies in this collection revisit established critical positions which confine Luigi Capuana’s work within the orbits of Naturalism and Positivism. A variety of theoretical readings in the volume investigate how the author’s experimentalism and eclectic interests respond to positivist ideology, the limitations of scientific practices, and the conflicts and anxieties of the fin de siècle which arise from a change in intellectual attitudes towards new ways of interpreting reality.

The volume’s three sections focus on cultural mediation and the construction of socio-literary identities, gender representation and metaliterature, and on the author’s experimentation with the natural, supernatural and fantastic. Each section illustrates how the search for the new and experimentalism constitute driving forces in the author’s artistic investigation and production, making his work an important source for a new reading of the fin de siècle’s epistemological revision.

Informations

• Publié par: Firenze University Press
• Date de parution: 02 décembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788864539171
• Langue: English

Extrait

STUDI E SAGGI
ISSN 2704-6478 (print) | ISSN 2704-5919 (online)
– 200 –




Studi di italianistica moderna e contemporanea nel mondo anglofono
Studies in Modern and Contemporary Italianistica in the Anglophone World
Comitato scientifico / Editorial Board
Joseph Francese, Direttore / Editor-in-chief ( Michigan State University )
Zygmunt G. Barański ( University of Cambridge )
Laura Benedetti ( Georgetown University )
Joseph A. Buttigieg ( University of Notre Dame )
Michael Caesar ( University of Birmingham )
Fabio Camilletti ( University of Warwick )
Derek Duncan ( University of Bristol )
Stephen Gundle ( University of Warwick )
Charles Klopp ( The Ohio State University )
Marcia Landy ( University of Pittsburgh )
Silvestra Mariniello ( Université de Montréal )
Annamaria Pagliaro ( Monash University )
Lucia Re ( University of California at Los Angeles )
Silvia Ross ( University College Cork )
Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg ( Brown University )
Titoli pubblicati / Published Titles
Francese J., Leonardo Sciascia e la funzione sociale degli intellettuali , 2012
Rosengarten F., Through Partisan Eyes. My Friendships, Literary Education, and Political Encounters in Italy (1956-2013). With Sidelights on My Experiences in the United States, France, and the Soviet Union , 2014
Ferrara M.E., Il realismo teatrale nella narrativa del Novecento: Vittorini, Pasolini, Calvino , 2014
Francese J., Vincenzo Consolo: gli anni de «l’Unità» (1992-2012), ovvero la poetica della colpa-espiazione , 2015
Bilenchi R., The Conservatory of Santa Teresa , Klopp C. e Nelson M. (a cura di), 2015
Ross S. and Honess C. (edited by), Identity and Conflict in Tuscany , 2015
Colucci D., L’Eleganza è frigida e L’Empire des signes. Un sogno fatto in Giappone , 2016
Cauchi-Santoro R., Beyond the Suffering of Being: Desire in Giacomo Leopardi and Samuel Beckett , 2016
Virga A., Subalternità siciliana nella scrittura di Luigi Capuana e Giovanni Verga , 2017
Caracchini C., Minardi E. (a cura di), Il pensiero della poesia. Da Leopardi ai contemporanei. Letture dal mondo di poeti italiani , 2017





Luigi Capuana: Experimental Fiction and Cultural Mediation in Post-Risorgimento Italy
edited by
Annamaria Pagliaro
Brian Zuccala

Firenze University Press
2019




Luigi Capuana: Experimental Fiction and Cultural Mediation in Post-Risorgimento Italy / edited by Annamaria Pagliaro and Brian Zuccala. – Firenze : Firenze University Press, 2019.
(Studi e saggi ; 200)
https://www.fupress.com/isbn/9788864539164
ISSN 2704-6478 (print)
ISSN 2704-5919 (online)
ISBN 978-88-6453-915-7 (print)
ISBN 978-88-6453-916-4 (online PDF)
ISBN 978-88-6453-917-1 (online EPUB)

Progetto grafico di Alberto Pizarro Fernández, Lettera Meccanica SRLs

***

This book was published with a contribution from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.
***
Peer Review Process
All publications are submitted to an external refereeing process under the responsibility of the FUP Editorial Board and the Scientific Committees of the individual series. The works published in the FUP catalogue are evaluated and approved by the Editorial Board of the publishing house. For a more detailed description of the refereeing process we refer to the official documents published on the website and in the online catalogue ( www.fupress.com ).
Firenze University Press Editorial Board
M. Garzaniti (Editor-in-Chief), M. Boddi, A. Bucelli, R. Casalbuoni, A. Dolfi, R. Ferrise, M.C. Grisolia, P. Guarnieri, R. Lanfredini, P. Lo Nostro, G. Mari, A. Mariani, P.M. Mariano, S. Marinai, R. Minuti, P. Nanni, G. Nigro, A. Perulli.
The present work is released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International ( CC BY-NC-ND 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode ). This license allows you to share the work by any means and format, as long as appropriate credit is given to the author, the work is not modified or used for commercial purposes and a URL link is provided to the license.
© 2019 Firenze University Press
Published by Firenze University Press
Firenze University Press
Università degli Studi di Firenze
via Cittadella, 7, 50144 Firenze, Italy
www.fupress.com
This book is printed on acid-free paper
Printed in Italy




Table of contents
Tradition and Experimentation in Capuana and Capuana Studies
Annamaria Pagliaro , Brian Zuccala
Part 1
Cultural Mediation in Post-Unification Italy: Constructing Socio-Literary Identities
Chapter 1
«Un medico filosofo»?: The Figure of the Doctor in Capuana’s Giacinta
Paul Barnaby
Chapter 2
Tra Meridionalismo e Verismo. Capuana e il BASSO POPOLO siciliano
Salvina Monaco
Chapter 3
Forging Italian Readers: Capuana’s Aesthetics for the Modern Italian Novel
Annamaria Pagliaro
Chapter 4
Alterisation and Romanticisation of the Sicilian People in Capuana’s Works: A Postcolonial Reading
Anita Virga
Part 2
On gender and (meta)literature
Chapter 5
GIACINTA, GIUSTINA E LE ALTRE: LA RAPPRESENTAZIONE DELLA NEVROSI IN LUIGI CAPUANA
Ambra Carta
Chapter 6
Profumo o il mal di parole
Edwige Comoy Fusaro
Chapter 7
CAPUANA, LO SPIRITISMO E I PERSONAGGI FEMMINILI
Lara Michelacci
Chapter 8
Gendered Self-Reflection and Theory of Form in Capuana’s LA SFINGE
Brian Zuccala
Part 3
Natural, Superhuman, Fantastic and Digital
Chapter 9
Fairy tales and ghosts. Luigi Capuana among Literature, Anthropology and Spiritism
Alberto Carli
Chapter 10
Posthuman Monsters in Luigi Capuana’s Fantastic Science Fiction Tales: Creazione and L’incredibile esperimento
Christina Petraglia
Chapter 11
FROM IL DOTTOR CYMBALUS TO UN VAMPIRO : THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL REVISION IN LUIGI CAPUANA’S WORK
Gabriele Scalessa
Chapter 12
Luigi Capuana spiritista: nei saggi, nell’opera letteraria e nel teatro
Mario Tropea
Chapter 13
CAPUANISTICA ENCOUNTERS DIGITAL HUMANITIES
Simon Musgrave
Brian Zuccala
THE AUTHORS
works cited





Tradition and Experimentation in Capuana and Capuana Studies
Annamaria Pagliaro
Monash University

Brian Zuccala
University of the Witwatersrand
The concept of artistic and literary experimentation is a crucial element for Capuana and consequently for Capuana studies. As we shall argue, it may in fact be considered the critically productive point of juncture between Capuana’s oeuvre and recent scholarly work on it, as well as the ideal point of departure for framing the diverse range of excursions into Capuana’s body of work by the contributors to this critical collection.
Capuana himself, like all the main Italian writers who contributed to naturalist literary production, such as Verga, Serao and De Roberto, in the 1870s and 1880s did conceive his artistic and theoretical endeavours as a pioneering attempt to radically change the Italian literary landscape, to update and render it competitive within a European – mostly French – literary scene, which had been in the previous thirty years at the forefront of literary innovation (see Capuana 1972a). For just over a decade Capuana pursued what has been critically regarded, in a rather reductive way we would like to argue, as an orthodox naturalist practice à la Zola, in which he wrote, along with the 1877 collection Profili di donne , his first naturalist novel Giacinta (in at least three main editions: 1879, 1886, 1889), dedicated to Zola himself, and a number of short stories about psychopathological cases (mostly female), such as Storia fosca (1880), Precocità (1884), Tortura (1889). Equally limiting is another critically established position, according to which in the 1880s a shift began, and Capuana’s by-then fading adherence to the naturalist doctrine of Verismo was reflected in both his later critical work ( Per l’arte, 1885, Libri e teatro, 1892, Gli ‘ismi’ contemporanei, 1898, and Cronache letterarie, 1899) and in his creative production. Capuana thereafter wrote the anti-naturalist and happy-ending Profumo (1890 and 1892), the idealist experiments La Sfinge (1895 and 1897) and Rassegnazione (1900 and 1907), and the eclectic Il Marchese di Roccaverdina (1901). He also extended his production of fairy tales and experimented with children’s novels as, for example, Gambalesta (1903), Scurpiddu (1898), Cardello (1907), Gli americani di Rabbato (1912). As to his short stories, in the last decade of the nineteenth and the first of the twentieth centuries, Capuana organised his materials in two main themes, with the publication of the collections Le appassionate (1893, now 1974a: 253-499) and Le Paesane (1894, now 1974b: 3-255). In addition, by re-connecting to the themes of his early short stories – Il dottor Cymbalus (1865) and Un caso di sonnambulismo (1874) – and through his essays on occult phenomena, Spiritismo? (1884) and Mondo occulto (1896), Capuana expanded his short story production so as to embrace a wider variety of topics, ranging from science and science f