Annamaria Pagliaro and Brian Zuccala (edited by), Luigi Capuana: Experimental Fiction and Cultural Mediation in Post-Risorgimento Italy, © 2019 FUP, CC BY 4.0 International, published by Firenze University Press (www.fupress. com), ISSN 2704-5919 (online), ISBN (online PDF) 978-88-6453-916-4 TRADITION AND EXPERIMENTATION IN CAPUANA AND CAPUANA STUDIES Annamaria Pagliaro Monash University Brian Zuccala University of the Witwatersrand Te concept of artistic and literary experimentation is a crucial ele- ment for Capuana and consequently for Capuana studies. As we shall argue, it may in fact be considered the critically productive point of junc- ture 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 Profli di donne, his frst 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 shif began, and Capuana’s by-then fading adher- ence to the naturalist doctrine of Verismo was refected in both his later critical work (Per l’arte, 1885, Libri e teatro, 1892, Gli ‘ismi’ contempora- nei, 1898, and Cronache letterarie, 1899) and in his creative production. Capuana thereafer wrote the anti-naturalist and happy-ending Profumo (1890 and 1892), the idealist experiments La Sfnge (1895 and 1897) and Rassegnazione (1900 and 1907), and the eclectic Il Marchese di Roccaver- dina (1901). He also extended his production of fairy tales and experiment- ed 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 frst 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