No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
distortion is probably inevitable in the presentation and assessment of such critical developments. Nonetheless, tracing the dominant features of several of the recent treatments of Verga's work-at least in their broad outlines-is not only possible but also instructive. Taken in its entirety, such a study has implications both for the relation between criticism and its literary object and for that between criticism and its social environment. During the postwar revaluation of verismo in general and of Verga in particular, a large number of important biographies, literary histories, and anthologies of Verga criticism appeared. But the one genuinely new aspect of this criticism in Italy was the examination of Verga's formal innovations in the use of the style indirect libre. This scrutiny of Verga's language had begun in Italy in 1941 with Luigi Russo's additions to his earlier volume, Giovanni Verga (1919-20). The discussion was continued and amplified in the 1940's and '50's by Vittorio Lugli, Giacomo Devoto, Nicola Vita, Leo Spitzer, and Ivo Franges, followed in the '60's and '70's by Hans S0rensen, Giulio Herczeg, Francesco Nicolosi, Giovanni Cecchetti, Antonio Lanci, Olga Ragusa, and others.1 It would be misleading to claim that all of these writers agree. Even in regard to matters of form, studies of verismo have always taken the shape of encounters and debates rather than of exchanges as such. Nevertheless, there is a sort of final consensus that the technical achievement of Verga's prose is its distinctive mixture of choral discourse, indirect discourse, and the style indirect libre. A well known passage from I Malavoglia, discussed by Devoto and Spitzer and then treated at length by Cecchetti and Ragusa, might help clarify this novel combination of effects:
Loading…
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 1 citations exist upstream.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.