CAPUANA, LUIGI. - Writer, b. at Mineo on 28 May 1839, d. at Catania on 29 Nov. 1915. He studied at Mineo at the Jesuit schools, then from 1850 he spent three years at the college of Bronte. At the University of Catania he attended the faculty of law, but suspended his studies in the second year and moved to Florence as theater critic for La Nazione. In 1872 he accepted the office of mayor of Mineo; in 1877 he was in Milan as a contributor to the Corriere della Sera and to literary journals, and cultivated the friendship of Giovanni Verga, Emilio Zola, Gabriele d'Annunzio.
A temperament inclined to irony, he made fun of Pietro Vetro by getting him to include, in the Raccolta amplissima of folk songs, some of his own dialect verses; even Alessandro D'Ancona discussed the line of the unknown Sicilian poet(!) «Donni c'aviti 'intellettu d'amuri». Like Carducci, C. also 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 in 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, ibid. 1892), which follow the manner and method of De Sanctis in the examination of works. In his novels and short stories he welcomed and developed the theory of an impersonal art in the service of science, hoping for harmony and fusion between the one and the other. Aiming above all at the true, he analyzed as «documents of life» cases of hysterical attacks in Profumo, pathological cases of morbid love in Giocinta, spiritistic evocations in Il marchese Roccaverdina, aspects of telepathy in the novel La sfige, groups of maniacs and strange beings in Le paesane and in Le nuove paesane. In these investigations, which range from naturalism to verism to experimentalism, his art, on models of Zola and Balzac, becomes exasperated; no moral concern has any place anymore, since C. concerns himself solely with art. Important is his dialect production and his literature for children; worth remembering is the satire on the ideologies of the 19th century in Rebracolone (Florence 1905). C. exercised a notable influence on his generation, even if in him «one senses too much the curious investigator of psychology and natural science» (B. Croce).