CAPUANA, LUIGI. — Writer, born in Mineo on 28 May 1839, died in Catania on 29 November 1915. He studied in Mineo at the Jesuit schools, then from 1850 spent three years at the college of Bronte. At the University of Catania he attended the Faculty of Law, but suspended his studies in his second year and went to Florence as a theatre critic for La Nazione. In 1872 he accepted the office of mayor of Mineo; in 1877 he was in Milan, a contributor to the Corriere della Sera and to literary journals, and cultivated the friendship of Giovanni Verga, Emilio Zola, and Gabriele d’Annunzio.
With a temperament inclined to irony, he made fun of Pietro Vetro by inducing him to include, in the Raccolta amplissima of popular songs, some of his own dialect verses; even Alessandro D'Ancona debated the verse of the unknown Sicilian poet(!), “Donni c'aviti 'intellettu d'amuri.” Like Carducci, C. too polemicized with M. Rapisardi (cf. Parodie: Giobbe, Luciferio with a preface by Giulio Salvadori, Catania 1884). He taught at the Istituto Superiore di Magistero in Rome and, from 1902 until his death, at the University of Catania, where he held the chair of Lexicography and Stylistics. His critical writings are noteworthy (Studi della letteratura contemporanea, Milan 1880; Gli ismi contemporanei, Catania 1898; Libri e teatro, there 1892), in which he adopted De Sanctis’s manner and method in examining works. In his novels and short stories he embraced and developed the theory of an impersonal art at the service of science, hoping for harmony and fusion between the two. Seeking above all to represent truth, he analyzed, as “documents of life,” cases of hysterical attacks in Profumo, pathological cases of morbid love in Giocinta, spiritist manifestations in Il marchese Roccaverdina, aspects of telepathy in the novel La sfige, and groups of maniacs and strange beings in Le paesane and Le nuove paesone. In these investigations, which range from naturalism to verism and experimentalism, his art, following the models of Zola and Balzac, becomes extreme; moral concerns no longer have any place, C. being concerned exclusively with art. His dialect production and his literature for children are important; worth recalling is the satire of the ideologies of the nineteenth century in Rebracolone (Florence 1905). C. exercised a considerable influence on his generation, even though in him “one feels too strongly the psychologist and natural-science enthusiast” (B. Croce).