Characters and Authors in Luigi Pirandello

by Caesar, Ann Hallamore

• ISBN13: 9780198151760
• ISBN10: 0198151764
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-03-05
• Publisher: Clarendon Press

Summary

Luigi Pirandello is best known in the English-speaking world for his radical challenge to traditional Western theatre with plays such as Six Characters in Search of an Author. But theatre is just one manifestation of his experiments with language which led to a remarkable collection of novels,short stories, and essays as well as his work for a film industry then in its infancy. This study, which is based on the view that Pirandello's writings are most fruitfully discussed in a European context, takes as its starting-point the author's belief in the primacy of the literary character in acreative process which is necessarily conflictual. The book argues that all Pirandello's characters are engaged in a continual performance which transcends the genre distinction between narrative and dramatic forms. In this performance it is the spoken word in which the characters invest most heavily as they struggle to sustain an identity of theirown, tell their life-stories, and assert themselves before their most prominent antagonist, the author himself.

Table of Contents

Note on Translations and Sources	x
1. Real and Implied Authors	1	(34)
2. The Rise of the Character: Six Characters and the Drama of Creativity	35	(29)
3. Self and Other in Society: Gossip, Shame, and Scandal	64	(37)
4. Configurations of Identity: The Family's Undoing	101	(32)
5. Narrative Space and the Multiplying Self: The Case of Uno, nessuno e centomila	133	(29)
6. Pirandello's Philosophers	162	(19)
7. The Author as Director: Characters and Actors	181	(36)
8. Performing Women	217	(44)
Bibliography	261	(8)
Index	269