Italian realist drama (1860--1918).
Item
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Title
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Italian realist drama (1860--1918).
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Identifier
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AAI9820578
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identifier
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9820578
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Creator
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Sfyris, Panagiotis.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Marvin Carlson
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Date
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1998
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Theater | Literature, Romance | Journalism
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Abstract
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This dissertation is a study on the esthetics and the sociology of the drama which developed in Italy during the first fifty years of its existence as a unified independent European nation, a period largely defined by the social hegemony of the borghesia, the cultural sway of positivism and the literary/artistic trends of realism and verismo, the Italian variant of European naturalism. Its purpose is three-fold: It introduces a significant dramatic literature, virtually unknown outside Italy, but also neglected and often dismissed by Italian scholarship. It a seriously in the (Anglo-american) scholarship of nineteenth and early twentieth century Western European drama and, most importantly, it challenges the prevalent idea of Nineteenth Century Italian drama as a cultural lacuna sprawling between the age of Goldoni and the age of Pirandello.;For almost a century this critical misconception has solidified the fallacy that the history of post eighteenth-century Italian drama has not been a history of evolution leading from the comedies of Goldoni via the romantic dramma storico, verismo and the dialect theatre, to the tragicomedy of Pirandello, but a history of a drama maladroitly emulating foreign models and trends. The study of realism/verismo, however, shows that there is a direct link between Goldoni and Pirandello; and that the latter constitutes not case of parthenogenesis in the context of European and Italian drama, but rather the culmination of a dramaturgical tradition which had persistently ventured to disclose, challenge and experiment with the relationship-discrepancy between reality (realta) and truth (verita).;The dissertation deals with playwrights whose career illustrates the various stages and aspects of Italian realism/verismo: Paolo Giacometti, Teobaldo Ciconi, Paolo Ferrari, Achille Torelli, Giovanni Verga, Giuseppe Giacosa, Gerolamo Rovetta, Marco Praga, E. A. Butti, Roberto Bracco, Sabatino Lopez and Dario Niccodemi. It contextualizes the work of these playwrights in the political, social and cultural history of post-Risorgimento Italy and pays particular attention to the various Italian literary trends which influenced verismo (regional dialect literature, scapigliatura, crepuscolarismo, etc.). Finally it provides a first perspective in Italian women playwrights, whose dramaturgy does indeed begin and mature with verismo.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
