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Luigi Capuana (May 28, 1839 – November 29, 1915) was an Italian author and journalist and one of the main exponents of Verismo. He was a contemporary of Giovanni Verga, both having been born in the province of Catania within a year of each other. He was also one of the first Italian authors influenced by the works of Émile Zola, French author and creator of naturalism. His critical theories on naturalism envisaged the ultimate fusion of the novel into a purely scientific, impersonal, case-history.
After graduating he enrolled in the Faculty of Law at Catania in 1857. He abandoned his studies in 1860 in order to take part in the uprising roused by Garibaldi's expedition. He became secretary of the Secret Committee of Insurrection in Mineo, and later chancellor of the nascent civic council.
During his conversations with Verga in Milan, Capuana became concerned with the creation of a new literature attentive to social and psychological truth (‘il vero’). He took as his model the experimental method elaborated in France by Émile Zola, according to which the writer, in imitation of the scientist, observed reality impassively without inquiring into its ultimate causes.
In the late 1870s Capuana published his first important works: the collection of Short story Profili di donne (1877), the critical essay Il teatro italiano contemporaneo (1877), and, above all, his first novel, Giacinta (1879), which is considered a landmark in Italy's naturalist tradition.
The influence of Zola on Giacinta, is apparent. The work is dedicated to him, and reflects both Zola's and his own belief that modern studies of heredity had made it possible to understand both the unity and variety of human life. Capuana's naturalism consisted much less in scientific and photographic accuracy than in the depiction of the individual as a product of the laws of nature and heredity. It also lent to Zola's Positivism a strong aesthetic dimension, in the belief that the work of art perfects science by giving a life to characters and events that is more complete that anything that scientific testing could provide. Capuana thus held that the novel was the work of both science and art in that it made possible the representation of case studies of eccentric people and situations within the general, determining conditions of life.
Another fundamental characteristic of the naturalistic novel had to be the impersonality of art, the rigid suppression, that is, in as far as possible of the writer's own personality and private views when telling a story. Capuana and Verga achieved the effect of the "invisible author" through stylistic devices such as choral narration – where events are reported through the comments of the village – or free indirect discourse and interior monologue – where the characters' thoughts are related as events and there is a constant shift between direct and indirect representation.
In 1901 he published his masterpiece, Il marchese di Roccaverdina (The Marquis of Roccaverdina), the story of the descent into madness of a Sicilian marquis, who, having killed his mistress's husband out of jealousy, is gradually driven to insanity by the guilt he suffers. Both in Giacinta and in the more complex Il marchese di Roccaverdina, Capuana takes as his focus the psychology of a protagonist whose actions contest immutable social norms and who is destined to meet defeat in madness and death.
Capuana was a very prolific writer. In addition to his novels, he wrote collections of short stories (e.g. Le paesane, 1894), many very successful children's fables (e.g. C'era una volta, 1882; Scurpiddu, 1898), and several Sicilian-dialect plays (published collectively in Teatro dialettale siciliano, Palermo, 1911-12, vols. 1-3; Catania, 1920-1, vols. 4-5). Capuana's plays in standard Italian and in the Sicilian dialect include Giacinta (1888), an adaptation of his major novel; Malia (Enchantment, 1895); Il cavaliere Pidagna (1911).
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