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

Abstract

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.