Rapes, Murders, Honor Killings: Forms of Violence in Giovanni Verga’s Short Stories
Rapes, Murders, Honor Killings: Forms of Violence in Giovanni Verga’s Short Stories

Author(s): Simone Pettine
Subject(s): Studies in violence and power, Italian literature
Published by: Transnational Press London
Keywords: Rapes; murders; honor; killings; forms; violence; Giovanni Verga; short stories; stories;
Summary/Abstract: Since Giovanni Verga’s death in 1922, the works of the Catanese author have been on the agenda of literary critics. Verga’s novels and short stories, as it is known, were poorly understood between the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, but they revolutionized the way of understanding literature, both in terms of the relationship between art and reality, and above all, from a stylistic-formal point of view. An exception was represented by a friend of the author Luigi Capuana, who commented on the publication of “Vita dei campi” in 1880 with these words: “the eight short stories have turned out to be works of art that find no counterpart in our faded literature and are on a par with the most beautiful works of this kind by Sand and Auerbach” (Capuana, 1972, p. 76). Indeed, Luigi Capuana and Federico De Roberto were two of the very few colleagues to understand the revolutionary nature of Giovanni Verga’s art.

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