Pagliaro, Annamaria, and Brian Zuccala, eds. Luigi Capuana: Experimental Fiction and Cultural Mediation in Post-Risorgimento Italy

Though Capuana is mainly known as a major contributor to Italian Verismo, he did not adhere faithfully and entirely to only one literary movement.Annamaria Pagliaro and Brian Zuccala's Luigi Capuana presents a collection of essays that aim to analyze the corpus of the Sicilian author by surveying different aspects of his writings.As an experimentalist writer, his bibliography includes verista novels, short stories involving psychopathological cases, an anti-naturalist novel, idealist experiments, eclectic writings, and fairy tales for children (9).The volume not only provides new viewpoints for how one should study a complex writer like Capuana, but it also demonstrates, in its concluding essay, an example of how Digital Humanities can be an innovative way to research literature.The first section, entitled Cultural Mediation in Post-Unification Italy: Constructing Socio-Literary Identities, deals with the role of Capuana as an important figure, both as a writer and critic, in the Italian fin de siècle.This era saw rapid changes in the literary movements of Post-Risorgimento Italy.Paul Barnaby opens with a re-examination of the parallelism that critics such as Croce saw between Giacinta's author and Doctor Fellini, the male protagonist of the novel.Many Capuanian scholars consider the medico-filosofo as the author's mouthpiece for his views on science.In his analysis, Barnaby observes the complexity of the narrative strategies employed by Capuana, as well as the author's reluctance in "reconciling positivist and idealist views of the psyche."(32) Salvina Monaco's contribution, at times through comparison with Giovanni Verga, pays particular attention to Capuana's portrayal of the Sicilian peasant society after the unification of Italy.She highlights the questione meridionale and how it was observed and dealt with by the political groups and by the veristi while emphasizing how Capuana's view of the matter differed from Verga.Annamaria Pagliaro's contribution to the volume recognizes the Sicilian writer as a militant critic of classical literary traditions.According to Capuana, the time had come for contemporary Italian literature to unbind itself from any "[…] subservience to patriotic and other political or nationalistic causes […]" (66), thus allowing for the art to evolve freely, in order for it to better represent contemporary human thought.The essay also examines Capuana's role as a literary critic, who strived for modernization, stating that critics must be forces that encourage artistic creativity.Similar to Modena, Anita Virga's study focuses on the portrayal of Sicilian people in the post-colonial period.She

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