A Self-Reflexive Verista Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana’s Narrative

This volume is one of few monographs on Italian post-Risorgimento author Luigi Capuana, and the first one written in English in more than four decades (since Davies 1979). Pivoting on the seemingly counter-intuitive notion of creative self-reflexivity, the volume is a rereading of most of Capuana’s narrative production beyond the ‘canonical’ verista framework that is still largely employed to look at the author and his works. The study opens with an overview of the landscape of capuanistica as it presents itself to contemporary scholars and critics. It then illustrates the methodological nuances of the notion of creative self-reflexivity and subsequently proceeds with two case studies, focusing on female characterisation and exploring ‘the margins’ of Capuana’s work, respectively. The volume closes with a ‘distant reading’ of self-reflexivity in Capuana’s entire oeuvre. Combining more traditional, historical-philological criticism with narratology and critical theory mostly developed in the Anglosphere, the volume contributes to placing Capuana into a transnational, comparative critical conversation about aspects of Italian literary culture such as issues of modernity/(proto)modernism, gender and the fin de siècle.

A Self-Reflexive Verista Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana' 3 Gender and Self-Reflections Beyond the caso psicopatologico: From Fasma to Fulvia… Through l'Ignota and Faccia Bella 45 three sections of his study, Zuccala both provides the reader with a detailed overview of the stato dell'arte in Capuana studies and illustrates the range of methodological tools to be deployed in his own analysis. Zuccala's methodology combines the tools of 'traditional' literary criticism, including a particularly sharp use of narratology, and more recent exegetic devices, developed and borrowed primarily from the Anglosphere. That is, indeed, one of the strengths of this study. It is worth remembering that, although a conference was held in Sicily on the centenary of Capuana's death (Catania, 11-12 dicembre 2015), the only international conference on Capuana was organised in what can be considered the Anglosphere -bilingual Montréal -in March 1989. The singularity of Zuccala's perspective comes, to a substantial extent, from his international, mostly Anglophone education (it is also noteworthy that he reads French and therefore accesses and quotes from original French sources). This explains why, amongst the studies informing his critical approach and his reading of Capuana's oeuvre, one finds, alongside the usual and seminal works of Italian capuanistica -including very recent ones or even ones still in-print -, the works of, among others, Bachmann-Medick, Waugh, Moretti, Davies, Barnaby, Wolf and Nünning. The two chapters "Gender and Self-Reflections Beyond the caso psicopatologico" and "Metareference in l'altro and l'ultimo Capuana" (4 and 5) constitute the core of Zuccala's argument. In these two sections, the Italian-Australian critic convincingly shows how, from the early Profili di donne (1877), all the way through to the early twentieth century, self-reflexivity represents a fil rouge through Capuana's theoretical as well as creative journeys. The whole of Capuana's massive corpus is taken into consideration, even though the focus is on his creative writing. Zuccala's exegetic postulation, in fact, entails a deliberately holistic and unselective approach, one that goes beyond genre-based distinctions and reductions. This proves to be a convincing, as well as a compelling approach, because Capuana's fundamental motivations do not change across genres: as much in essays as in short novellas, in academic lectures as much as in fairy tales, in narrative-non-fiction as much as in novels, Capuana constantly chases after the holy Grail of the perfect incarnation of concepts into what he calls la forma artistica. Within such a framework, 'close reading' allows one to identify and verify the macro-tendencies that 'distant reading' highlights, and vice versa.
A consistent feature of Capuana's writing is the nexus between theory and practice. His production is certainly not ascribable to that line -be it described as a vein, a tradition, an effect, a galaxy or a mode -of humouristic and intrinsically metareferential writing that characterises a vast portion of nineteenth-century Italian culture in the field of literature and journalism, especially in the scapigliato milieu. Capuana is primarily a narrator ("Alle teoriche bado poco, chie-do lavori, lavori, lavori!", quotes Zuccala from 'Ismi' contemporanei of 1898, 6), yet, when narrating virtually anything, he is actually reflecting on himself at the writing desk. When considering Capuana's entire corpus, an increasing amount of self-reflexivity over the years becomes obvious. In the context of his reflection on creative praxis, this creates a configuration that can be understood as a system of communicating vessels: periods of intense critical production and limited creative output alternate with periods when, on the contrary, creative production abounds and theoretical work is lacking.
The original and completely convincing argument that develops in chapter 4, which is erudite and articulate, reaches a veritably "counter-canonical reading of il femminile" (95). Although Capuana's female characterisation has been widely and deeply explored by other scholars, its functions as a "self-reflexive device" (74) and "catalyst for metareferential reflection" (99) have not hitherto been highlighted. Brian Zuccala fills this gap: "women are the privileged medium through which the metadiscourse on art […] unfolds" (54) and "the narrative/creative act is configured quite explicitly as an act of (masculine) possession triggered by erotic desire" (54). Even though -as Zuccala rightly highlights -Capuana certainly appreciates some of the (few) charismatic women writers of his times and manifests such a high esteem in some of his critical works, the idea of the 'spermatic ink' seems to remain a fixture of Capuana's conception. Similar conclusions were drawn in a study of mine, dedicated to proto-fantascientifica Italian literature, in which I pointed out that Capuana's stories declaring the triumph of the 'cerebral man' anticipate Marinetti's Mann-anschauung (Comoy Fusaro 2013). The reflections carried out in chapter 5 are equally innovative. Among those, the analysis of "Dolore senza nome" stands out: in this short story, Zuccala argues, "possibly for the first time, there is a collective voice of the artist's entourage intervening to contradict what the artist thinks of himself and his work" (108). We are already at the level of Pirandello's problematisation of the relationship between an author and their characters.
Among significant outcomes of the study is the reevaluation of the entire corpus, with, on the one hand, the rediscovery of previously neglected or completely ignored works -including the aforementioned short story "Dolore senza nome", the short essay "L'eterno femminino", the novel La Sfinge, as well as the "pagine memorialistiche" (6) of Ricordi di infanzia e di giovinezza (2005), recently republished by Aldo Fichera. 1 On the other hand, the importance of other better-known works comes under scrutiny in Zuccala's analysis. By putting emphasis on works such as Profili di donne and Rassegnazione, Zuccala coun-

Introduction
To 'read against the grain' means […] [to] resist authority, resist hermeneutic inertia: the authority of the commentary tradition, the authority of "it must be read thus because it always has been read thus". Put hermeneutic pressure on the text.

Zuccala Introduction
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 20 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, title -20 I will then attempt to give 'internal' evidence for these newly foregrounded patterns in the light of the very theoretical principles that will have arisen from a combined reading of self-reflexive narrative and critical writing. I will thus demonstrate how self-reflexive narrative progressively becomes the preferred artistic response for Capuana, who, decade after decade, becomes increasingly antiaccademico, 4 gradually losing faith, not so much in some of what he considers fundamental principles of the arts 5 but, rather, in the proliferation of those "'ismi' contemporanei" (1898) that he regards as little more than pseudo-doctrines à la page.
Before delving into a close reading of a selection of Capuana's texts, it is appropriate to show why such a far-reaching self-reflexive approach is more than just exegetically useful. By reflecting on those recent 'turns' in Capuana's criticism that have aimed to break away from a long-standing Verismo/Naturalism-centred line of enquiry, it must be shown how such an approach is critically needed at this stage of capuanistica. In other words, it is important to focus on why and how the issue of (self-)reflexivity increasingly appears to position itself at the point of intersection of many still-open and cogent questions in Capuana studies and to offer itself as a potential answer to a significant proportion of those questions.

'Genre Studies' in Early Criticism and 'Classic' Monographs
With the exception of individual magazine reviews of specific works and an insightful 1896 overview by Luigi Pirandello, Capuana criticism begins with the well-known, widely investigated and enormously influential essay by Benedetto Croce, " Luigi Capuana -Neera" (1905).
various and substantial issues touched on in the essay, the one that has possibly exerted the greatest effect upon later criticism is Croce's neat separation of Capuana's theorising activity from his creative endeavours, and the priority he gives to Capuana's theoretical contribution to the verista cause, however fundamental, to the detriment of the role and the actual quality of his narrative. To put it in Giovanni Carsaniga's terms: "[There is] the widespread myth that in Italian Verismo […] Luigi Capuana was the theoretical mind and Verga his disciple" (2003,70). Or, as Domenico Calcaterra writes: "È opinione che ha trovato largo consenso, la preminenza da accordare al Capuana critico rispetto al più che prolifico narratore" (2015,85). Even though Capuana strongly disputed the definition of his being the "campione" (Capuana 1899, 247; 1888b, XI) of Italian Naturalism, the critical premise persisted that Capuana was little else but a fine critic and the literary theorist who promoted Italian Verismo. 4 Consequently, critics depreciated what was in fact an interestingly ambivalent approach to Naturalism, questioned the very relevance of his 'post-verista' theoretical work and undervalued the technical quality of most of his vast creative production, often comparing it negatively to the work of the writer who is still seen as the greatest exponent of the Verismo movement, Giovanni Verga. 5 Croce's critical strategy of carefully distinguishing between the on-the-whole insightful, albeit fallible, critic and the me-4 Scalia's early monograph had begun questioning the "pigeon-holing" (Scalia 1952, 121) of Capuana by early critics. However, it had little impact. Interest in Capuana's 'narratology', although most prominent and unchallenged in the early stages of Capuana studies, has, to date, not disappeared. See also Scuderi 1970, 9-21. Longo (1978 curated one unpublished "Prolusione" for Critica letteraria, while an analysis of Capuana's "itinerario accademico" appears in Comes 1976, 41-106. Amongst the more recent work on his theory, see Storti Abate 1993; the Capuana section in Patruno 1985 as well as the section titled "Critica e teoria letteraria in Capuana" (1996, 55-110), as well as Carta 2008 and2011. 5 See also Re, for whom "Capuana stesso però non ha avuto la fortuna critica di Verga, né la sua posizione nel canone è paragonabile a quella del suo conterraneo e amico, rispetto a cui viene sempre visto come secondario. Spesso definito in senso negativo 'naturalista' invece che autentico verista" (2009,94). Indeed, Carsaniga writes: "It is doubtful whether anyone would now read his fiction had he not taken such a vigorous and controversial role in the literary debates of his time" (2003,. The discrepancy between Verga's and Capuana's popularity is proven also by the discrepancy in number and relevance of the attempts to translate their work. Translators such as Santi Buscemi (Capuana 2013a), have recently been trying to fill the gap. Interestingly, some of Capuana's collections of fairy tales, such as C'era una volta (1882), and a few short stories, such as the Gothic story "Un vampiro" ([1904] 1974c, 203-21), have been slightly more appealing to translators from shortly after their publication, as shown by the existence of the anonymous collection of translations Once Upon a Time: Fairy Tales Translated from the Italian of Luigi Capuana (1892b) and an early translation of Nimble-Legs. A Story for Boys (Scurpiddu, 1898). The point about the overall scarcity of Capuana studies in the Anglosphere is made clearly by Hiller (2009, 168). This argument can be supported by looking at the comparatively limited space dedicated to Capuana in comprehensive overviews of Italian literature such as the Cambridge History ("The Literature of United Italy, 1870-1910") in which no more than half a page diocre novelist forms the basis of early neo-Crocean biographical profiles such as Luigi Russo's ([1923] 1951, histories of literature such as Attilio Momigliano's ([1935Momigliano's ([ ] 1962, and critical analyses in genre studies such as Paul Arrighi's Le vérisme dans la prose narrative italienne (1937). The same imbalance is to be found in many of the later seminal and, to varying degrees, Marxist-informed genre studies on Verismo as a literary movement, such as those by Mario Pomilio (1963), Roberto Bigazzi (1969) and Marina Musitelli Paladini (1974) as well as the two volumes of proceedings Naturalismo e Verismo (1988). A Marxist approach, increasingly popular in the post Second World War Italian intellectual milieu, 6 had revived interest in socio-economic reality in general and therefore 'realistic' literature in particular, which was regarded, however naively, as the cultural artefact that best allows one to reflect on that reality. Those essays thus appear to be intrinsically more preoccupied with investigating the literary category of realism and its (mostly) class-related implications than exploring Capuana's fiction-making endeavours themselves. These contributions focus mainly on his critical work and discuss the part played by Capuana's seven major collections of essays in "la nascita d [ella] […] poetica veris[ta]" (Musitelli Paladini 1974, 9), while making very clear that "tra la teoria e la pratica" (90), of Capuana the narrator "il passo è […] lunghissimo" (90). But even the largely (Post) Marxist-informed Italian criticism of the Sixties and Seventies, and more sporadically, the Eighties, which focused more extensively and 'monographically' on Capuana, persisted in assessing him and his oeuvre in a rather reductive and ultimately unproductive light: in the works of such critics as Gaetano Trombatore (1949), Vittorio Spinazzola (1970) and Enrico Ghidetti (1982), Capuana's narrative work, once again, comes across as the output of a mediocre narrative talent and, what will prove to be even worse for his future reception, the output of a rather narrow-minded, right-wing conservative, land-owning bourgeois. Such a (comparative) marginalisation of the figure of Capuana as a narrator and a creative writer in those years and in that Marx- (Dombroski 1997, 463-4) is dedicated to Capuana, as opposed to the five pages dedicated to Verga (1997, 464-9).
6 The increased popularity of this critical approach was partly due to the translation of György Lukács' Saggi sul realismo (1950) and Il marxismo e la critica letteraria (1953). Whilst the early debate on Verismo was particularly lively at mid-century -with comprehensive works such as Marzot 1941 -the categories of Verismo and Naturalism have continued to be studied in monographic contributions in more recent years: it will suffice to mention Carnazzi 1996;Pagano 1999;Petronio 2003;Luperini 2007;and Pellini 2010, among others. In all these works, too, Capuana is taken into consideration primarily for his theoretical production and, amongst these, Pellini's view of Capuana is a rather exemplary one: a "narratore modesto e teorico tutt'altro che originale" (2010,11), characterised by a "disimpegno […] ammantato di scrupoli formalistici" (76). See also Merola 2006, particularly the chapter "Modernità del romanzo naturalista" (21-53) and, on Capuana and Pirandello in relation to the Verismo movement, Salsano 2005Salsano , 2006 ist cultural terrain is, in fact, not only of a 'technical' nature, as is made apparent for instance by Gaetano Trombatore's classic Riflessi letterari del Risorgimento in Sicilia (1970), which expresses perplexities of an ideological kind about Capuana's contribution to the verista cause. Riflessi letterari praises the civic engagement of "il verismo economico del Verga" (30), 7 while, at the same time, criticising Capuana for his social and ethical detachment: " [il] non [avere visto] mai nel verismo nulla più che un fatto strettamente letterario" (76). The basis of Trombatore's appraisal is a synthesis of the theory of Verismo in three elements: "documento umano, procedimento scientifico e linguaggio" (81). Verismo's potential was enormous, because "un saggio uso della [sua] formula" could have led to a deep understanding of the whole human condition as being dependent on "una particolare struttura economico sociale" (84). However, Capuana circumscribes the verista formula exclusively, "nell'ambito […] della sua accezione scientifica" (82), and represents "fatti di ordine [...] eccezionale e patologico […] con accento [...] obbiettivo e scientifico" (83) but without an adequate socio-economic perspective, or, even worse, he deliberately avoids any socio-economic implications. 8 Such a contention also informs the major monograph by Carlo Alberto Madrignani (1970). Madrignani's work remains invaluable for its contextualisation of Capuana's naturalismo and the analysis of pivotal naturalist works such as Giacinta and it can be regarded as a testament to the pervasiveness of some 'ideologically biased' views in relation to Capuana's works. What is symptomatic of Madrignani's biases is the actual period covered by his book, which is directly determined by the ideological stance informing his work. Capuana e il naturalismo (1970) based its rather narrow selection of narrative texts, which revolves around the novels Giacinta and Profumo and the short stories written in-between, on the assumption that Capuana had little to offer after Profumo (1890; 1892c), either from the standpoint of theoretical insightfulness, narrative complexity or ideological coherence (Madrignani 1970, 248).
A paradigm-changing hypothesis that helped reorient the direction of Capuana studies was put forward by Judith Davies (1979). Davies' monograph, the third and last one in English after the far less influential works by Traversa (1968) and Scalia (1952), encompassed all five of Capuana's major novels, including La Sfinge (1895 in episodes and 1897 in volume), Rassegnazione ([1907] 2000), and his widely recognised masterpiece, Il Marchese di Roccaverdina ([1901] 1999b). Davies' appraisal partly contested the so-called involuzione 7 And Trombatore 1970, 84. A similar argument is to be found in the almost coeval Tanteri 1971, 4, 49 andin Pomilio 1963, 124.

• Capuana naturalista malgré lui: 'Classics' and 'New Turns' in Capuana Studies
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 26 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative,[21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38] (7) of an author who had been regarded, after Profumo, as culturally irrelevant in the rapidly changing fin-de-siècle literary landscape (Mazzamuto 1969, 986;Mauro 1971, 13;Luti 1954 and1973, VII). Davies' major thesis is twofold: on the one hand, she takes issue with this assessment of a "career which may be divided chronologically" (153). She maintains, rather, that there is continuity in Capuana's ideological positioning and, at the same time, that there is a persistent duality involving his positivist rationalism inflected by Hegelianism, which surfaced, in varying degrees, as the Italian and European cultural scenes shifted and presented new challenges. On the other hand, Davies claims that for just over a decade Capuana pur-sued what has been critically regarded, in what is in itself a rather reductive way, as an 'orthodox' naturalist practice à la Zola. In this period he wrote, along with the 1877 collection Profili di donne, his first naturalist novel, Giacinta (in at least three main editions: 1879,1886,1889), dedicated to Zola himself, and a number of short stories about psychopathological cases (mostly female), such as "Storia fosca" (1879), "Precocità" (1884), "Tortura" (1888), to be grouped together in two collections: the early Storia fosca ([1883] 1974a, 171-231) and, later, Le appassionate (1893). Davies highlights "how brief was in fact [the 'naturalist period',] the period when scientific materialism seemed to offer Capuana a total approach to reality", and yet how: "Capuana was involved not so much in an ideological volte-face, as, right from the beginning, in […] the compromise of his hegelismo scientifico which remained constant throughout his career, though the changing climate of the times served to emphasise its different components in succession" (1979,7). In so doing, her work bestows upon the 'rest' of Capuana's body of work a literary 'dignity' and status it had, on the whole, never before enjoyed. Davies' study marked what may be described as "La riscoperta di Capuana" (Colicchi 1980). It managed to reignite a critical interest in the author that (very) gradually extended to incorporate the totality of his work, including the until then semi-ignored essays on the themes of Spiritualism and the Occult (Capuana [1884(Capuana [ ] 1995(Capuana [ and [1896(Capuana [ ] 1995, the several collections of fairy tales, the theatre in Italian and dialect, the idealist experiments La Sfinge (1897) and Rassegnazione ([1907] 2000), the eclectic Il Marchese di Roccaverdina ([1901Roccaverdina ([ ] 1999a, and his children's novels, Gambalesta ([1903] 2010), Scurpiddu ([1898] 2013b), Cardello ([1907] 2009a), Gli americani di Ràbbato (1912). Critics also gradually came to acknowledge the existence of a corpus of short stories that ranges well beyond the two traditional themes of physiopathology -epitomised by Le appassionate ([1893] 1974a, 253-499) -and rural Sicilian peasant life -epitomised by Le paesane ([1894] 1974b, 3-255) -and covers a wide variety of topics, from science and science fiction (for example, in the collection Un vampiro [1904] 1974c, 199-236) to psychological investigation and (overtly) self-reflexive fiction (particularly the collections Il decameroncino, 1901, Coscienze, 1905, and La voluttà di creare, 1911. All of these eclectic materials were gradually brought to light again in a critical scene that was not only increasingly curious and oriented towards (perceived) 'minor writers' but also increasingly ambitious from a theoretical standpoint. As a peculiar consequence of rediscovering new 'primary sources' at a time of overall shifts in Italian studies (and in literary studies and the humanities by and large), for a number of years now, Capuana scholarship has also been developing in diverse methodological directions, through a few monographic studies (the little-known Guarnieri 2012, 9 and the aforementioned and by-now widely disseminated Michelacci 2015), conference proceedings (Capuana Verista 1984;, edited collections (Scarano 1985) and some translations (Capuana 2013a(Capuana , 2014(Capuana , 2016, but mostly through individual essays. Each of these works, in its own way, has emphasised the presence and 'weight' of Capuana in fin-de-siècle Italian culture and literature. They have also clarified his contributions in pioneering the modern and contemporary style of "giornalismo letterario" (Oliva 1979, 187) with his work for La Nazione, and, with his Semiritmi (1888a), the form of the "verso libero", 10 as well as the fairy tale genre, the Italian giallo and the genre of letteratura fantascientifica, which developed in Italy when the traction gained by Positivism declined.
Whilst I have attempted elsewhere, and in different settings, to give an overview of the new landscape of capuanistica as it presents itself to scholars today, my aim here is simultaneously 'narrower' -in that I omit a detailed discussion of some individual titles -and yet more ambitious theoretically, in that I attempt an illustration, however necessarily cursory, of how the individual methodologies and the individual themes that have been the building blocks of the subfield of Capuana studies have progressively come closer to one another and mutually hybridised in a way that renders capuanistica more relevant within Italian studies and this study's chosen angle of self-reflexivity more compelling within capuanistica itself. In fact, proving this very hybridisation consolidates the 'status' of Capuana studies itself within the landscape of Italian studies, by showing how studying Capuana is far from an archaeo-philological indulgence towards a minore. It is an exegetic tool to cut through the entire breadth of intellectual production in Liberal Italy, both chronologically  and from the point of view of literature and culture. It also pro-

History and Philology
Despite the fact that the Archivio of the Biblioteca Capuana in Mineo has long been difficult to access (Palermo 1979, 23), the work of the Fondazione Verga and the Italian academy in general, following a mainly, but not exclusively, historical-philological orientation, has led to discoveries of new authorial materials even in very recent years, as well as to accurate and comparative studi delle fonti. Over the years, a number of special issues have been published by the Annali della Fondazione Verga, featuring work on manuscripts from the Archivio, as well as contributions on specific topics such as the remarkable volume on the Risorgimento, edited by Giuseppe Sorbello, L'Unità d'Italia nella rappresentazione dei veristi (2012b). 11 Capuana has also recently been at the core of a welcome, however belated, 'institutional' interest -the same interest that has already involved major figures of Verismo such as Verga: in 2009 the monumental series of volumes of the Edizione nazionale delle opere di Luigi Capuana opened with a collection of his Cronache teatrali, edited by renowned 'Capuanist' Gianni Oliva. 12 From the angle of bibliographical investigation, in 2016 Mario Bocola updated the first full bibliography on Capuana by Gino Raya (1969), with his extremely comprehensive Bibliografia di Luigi Capuana: 1968, which had the additional merit of going beyond national boundaries. Yet, history and philology have become increasingly intertwined with other, less philological approaches: an essentially philological ratio is, for example, at the basis of some otherwise pervasively thematic contributions revolving around (female) characterisation such as that by Paul Barnaby (1991), who reinterprets some aspects of the novel Giacinta by following the 'authorial variations' throughout its three major editorial versions (1879,1886,1889). A similar approach also informs Enrica Rossetti's "Il romanzo teatrale nei saggi critici di Capuana" 11 Fondazione Verga has been the publisher, since 1984, of the Annali della Fondazione Verga, quantitatively still the most important source of publications not only on Capuana, but on Verismo in general. In this context, works by such scholars as Bertazzoli (1983); De Cesare (1992Cesare ( , 1997; Durante (1998);Bocola (1999); Sardo (2008); Bellini (2011);Meli (2012); Di Silvestro (2012); ; and Cassola (2015) should be noted. The Fondazione has also worked 'monographically' on Capuana's theatre, on which see the contributions by Muscariello (77-90), Nay (91-134) and  in Il teatro verista (vol. 1, 2007), and individual essays such as the lengthy Sanfilippo 2008, as well as Morace 2015 andNicastro 2015. 12 Under the direction of philologist Gianvito Resta. Among Oliva's important contributions on Capuana's theatre, see also Oliva 1999 andCapuana 1999c.

• Capuana naturalista malgré lui: 'Classics' and 'New Turns' in Capuana Studies
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 29 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, 21-38 (1990) and, more recently Ambra Carta's Il romanzo italiano moderno: Dossi e Capuana (2008), both of which, drawing on Davies, investigate the idea of Capuana's prose as shifting progressively towards an intermediate form of 'theatrical novel', through mapping the varying proportions between direct and indirect discourse in the main editions of Giacinta.
Likewise, along lines that can also be regarded as partly historicalphilological and partly 'cultural', Capuana's intellectual background and the philosophical influences on his poetics have been another crucial feature of the renewed interest in the author and his oeuvre. Croce's initial argument, stressing the alleged theoretical contradictions implicit in Capuana's choice of mentors -the Positivist thinker Angelo Camillo De Meis and the idealist philosopher Francesco De Sanctis, author of the 1866 Saggi critici -had long been the foundation for assessing the author's poetics. Drawing on Croce's early argument, Trombatore (1949), Palermo (1964) and Navarria (1968) endeavoured to further examine the nuances of that hybrid mentorship. Palermo suggested that a way of understanding how Capuana could integrate such different philosophical traditions into a relatively coherent system is that of looking at the common matrix of his two inspirations. Palermo's essay is the first to highlight that "nonostante una precisa testimonianza diretta, quella del Capuana stesso […], quasi nessuno degli studiosi che si sono occupati di lui ha dato il necessario peso all'incontro , which played a central role in instilling in Capuana's poetics "il concetto delle forme artistiche e del loro svolgimento nella storia" (350). Palermo claims that Capuana's undoubtedly articulate but sometimes contradictory attempts to accommodate materialism and idealism holistically into the same theory of artistic forms began after encountering Hegel first-hand, and benefitted greatly from the encounter with De Meis' philosophical novel Dopo la laurea in English, see Traversa 2005. In fact, De Meis' idea of equating the (Hegelian) evolution of the forms of art in history with the biological development of a living organism (which Capuana assimilates) can be regarded as the most striking evidence of this attempt to merge two fundamentally different philosophical inspirations. Despite Palermo's contention, most later critics -starting with Madrignani 13 -have argued that Capuana never really dared to address the monumental Hegelian system directly, filtering it exclusively through De Sanctis' and De Meis' appropriations. In order to dismiss the hypothesis of a direct influence of Hegel's texts on Capuana's, it has been customary to refer to Capuana's essay Spiritismo? (1884), in which Capuana claims to be a dilettante when it comes to philosophical speculations. 14 These arguments, however, seem to deliberately overrate the quasi-Horatian protestationes modestiae on Capuana's part, while overlooking those instances in which his intellectual indebtedness to Hegel's texts is most clearly declared. 15 In line with Palermo's argument, recent critics, such as Silvio Balloni, have provided philological evidence that Capuana may have engaged with Hegel's works in a more direct and, perhaps, deeper way. For Balloni, "la lettura degli scritti di Hegel fu attenta e approfondita, poiché poté svolgersi nella traduzione italiana di Antonio Novelli" and "non avvenne solo tramite La Poétique par W.F. Hegel di Charles Bénard" (2007, 136-7). 16 Christina Petraglia's "Il marchese-contadino" (2010; emphasis in original), once again combining historical-philological close reading and a philosophical take enriched by cultural studies, has suggested an insightful 'Hegelian' reading of the master-servant dynamics in Capuana's Il Marchese di Roccaverdina. Petraglia's close textual analysis draws on a specific section of Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), the famous "Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage", in which the German philosopher expresses his well-known theory of the master-slave dialectic. This reassessment of Hegel's oeuvre as directly and heavily woven into Capuana's fictional and non-fictional work alike is of particular consequence for this study. Its importance cannot be overstated, as it lays the philosophical foundation on which the core interpretative proposition presented in these pages is built.

Ideology
In line with the steady rise of cultural studies and of what can be generally termed 'ideological criticism' in recent decades, the cultural features of gender, class and race -and intersectional combinations thereof -have also been gaining prominence within the field of Capuana studies. In particular, just as a certain degree of ideological 'bias' was a very important factor in shaping the field of Capuana studies in its early stages, ideology has remained topical at the (present) moment of attempting to disentangle the field from those very biases.
The reassessment of Capuana's ideological critique is a major element of Annamaria Pagliaro's essays, "Aspetti tecnici e continuità tematica ne La Sfinge di Luigi Capuana" (1989) and "Il Marchese di Roccaverdina di Luigi Capuana: Crisi etica o analisi positivistica" (1997), as well as in most of Paul Barnaby's 'Italianist' work (1997. Barnaby endeavours to expand on both Trombatore's and Pagliaro's post-Risorgimento, nation-building angle (1997), through emphasising the allegorical levels and religious backdrop of some of the novels, such as La Sfinge ([1897b] 2012), Profumo (1890Profumo ( , 1892c and Il Marchese di Roccaverdina ([1901] 1999a. The same nation-building approach has also been followed by Franco Manai,17 who extensively and primarily explored Capuana's conceptualisation of class. Similarly, Salvina Monaco (2012b) and Lara Michelacci (2017) have also focused on the question of Capuana's purportedly conservative ideology as it is reflected in his quasi-scientific explorations and/or his representation of the Sicilian working-classes within the context of the coeval political upheavals in Sicily. Monaco (2012aMonaco ( , 2019 in particular delivers a detailed historical analysis of Capuana's political leanings and his increasingly inflexible and belligerent "crispismo" at the turn of the twentieth century, that is, his Francesco Crispi-inspired right-wing conservative ideology. Similarly, 'ideological' work has been done on Capuana as a writer of fairy tales. This scholarly line draws on early works by Gabriella Congiu Marchese (1982), Giuseppina Romagnoli Robuschi (1969), Anna Barsotti (1984); Enrico Malato (1990) and Roberto Fedi (1990Fedi ( , 1997. More recently Gina Miele, with her essays "Through the Looking Glass: A Consideration of Luigi Capuana's fiabe" (2009b), and "Luigi Capuana: Unlikely Spinner of Fairy Tales?" (2009a), has highlighted the verista aspects of Capuana's fiabe, and also their thinly veiled social commentary. These works, on the whole, explore Capuana's techniques in relation to the values promoted more or less explicitly by his texts. 18 The educational features in some of Capuana's romanzi per ragazzi have been compellingly analysed by Rosaria Sardo (2010), while Alberto Carli has focused more broadly on the intersection of journalism and children's literature (2007,2012,2015) and also on their connection with Capuana's involvement in education (2011). 19 17 See Manai 1992Manai , 1995Manai , 1997and, to a lesser extent, also 1996. 18 Along the same lines, one should also mention Nicolò Mineo (2015), who focuses specifically on Capuana's last published collection of fairy tales.
19 On his collaboration with the educational publisher Rocco Carabba, see Luciana Pasquini's "Introduzione" to Capuana's Racconti per ragazzi, 1901-1913Oster (2015), who analyses Capuana's representation of Sicily within a discussion of North vs South Italian and European public narratives; and the contributions on Capuana and the Risorgimento movement by Durante (2012) and Longo (2012).
The latest development in this ideological debate has been provided -within a postcolonial framework and drawing, to some extent, on earlier works by Lucia Re (2009) and Pietro Mazzamuto (1996) -by Virga's recent monograph (2017b, see also 2017a and 2019) as well as individual essays such as those by Zuccala (2018b) and Poggioli-Kaftan (2018). Here some of Capuana's texts are reread, poststructurally, not as the obtusely conservative reactions of a threatened exponent of the conservative elite but as the product of the hybrid socio-ethnocultural position of an intellectual torn between the ideological framework of the hegemonic national ruling elite and the peripheral world of the rural Sicilian subaltern classes. This postcolonial approach is indeed only one of the cultural turns 20 that have invested Capuana studies after affecting Italian studies as a whole.

Gender and Intermedial 'Turns'
Another very significant area of investigation, prompted by the consolidation of gender studies within Italian studies over the last few decades, is the analysis of female representation and, more broadly, gender dynamics in Capuana's texts. As seen, in early criticism and 'classic' monographs, the attention to these themes was, on the whole, in the form of scattered references, thematic clusters and individual, 'canonised' characters such as Giacinta. Likewise, it is within the conceptual and chronological boundaries of the naturalistic 'phase' of Capuana's fictional production -as canonised by Madrignani, Traversa and Davies (in the 1880s) -that gender-focused contributions have proliferated in recent years.
Scholars such as Annamaria Cavalli Pasini (1982Pasini ( , 2015, Federica Adriano (2010), Edwige Comoy Fusaro (2007, Valeria Pappalardo (1995), Dora Marchese (2009), Lara Michelacci (2015 21 and Ambra Carta (2019) have explored what earlier critics had classified generically as a 'scientific' interest or 'psychological' approach. Cavalli Pasini and Adriano suggest detailed linkages between the symptoms mostly manifested by Capuana's female characters and the findings of medical science in the late nineteenth century, which -as Foucault's The History of Sexuality (1978) illustrates -had deeply permeated European cultural and literary discourse. Along the same 20 I draw on Ponzanesi 2012. For a more comprehensive take on cultural turns, see Bachmann-Medick 2016. Amongst other recent contributions using 'turn' in relation to Italian studies see Bond 2014. 21 See Pappalardo 1995and Michelacci 2015, especially the chapters on Giacinta (45-77) and Profumo (79-115).

• Capuana naturalista malgré lui: 'Classics' and 'New Turns' in Capuana Studies
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 33 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative,[21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38] lines, such works as Pappalardo (1997), 22 Comoy Fusaro (2001, and Olive (2001) suggest that Capuana not only assimilated and applied the then most advanced physiological notions to his literary investigations of the human psyche, but also reelaborated and expanded upon these notions in a way that foreshadowed Freudian and Jungian intuitions. These critics argue, for instance, that there is an Oedipus complex at the basis of Profumo's mother-son bond, and that the Freudian notion of "la reminiscenza del trauma" (Comoy Fusaro 2001, 125) can been seen in Giacinta's behaviour after being abused, while "l'esistenza della sessualità infantile" (126) can be found in the flashback to Patrizio's childhood in Profumo as well as in the short story "Precocità" ([1884] 1974a, 333-42). 23 In tune, once again, with a general shift in Italian studies -and in the study of modern languages, for that matter -towards interdisciplinarity in general and intermediality in particular, scholars have begun to look at Capuana's writing in relation to other art forms. The studies by Antonio Di Silvestro (1999), Sarah Hill (2004), Giuseppe Sorbello (2008Sorbello ( , 2012aSorbello ( , 2014, Giuliana Minghelli (2009), and very recently Comoy Fusaro (2018) as well as, more tangentially, Gussago and Zuccala (2019) argue that the appreciation for the new medium of photography that Capuana shared with his fellow veristi is most useful in understanding some features of Verismo itself and its ambition to 'capture' reality objectively and without bias but not merely as an exact 'photography-like' reproduction. Anna Maria Damigella's monograph, Capuana e le arti figurative (2012) -along with essays such as Annamaria Loria's " Luigi Capuana e Sebastiano Del Piombo" (2005) -extends this line of research to Capuana's overall relationship with the visual arts and adds to the already established image of an eclectic Capuana, at once photographer, "disegnatore e pupazzettista" (Damigella 2012, 13) and performer of "esperimenti di incisione" (21). Among the aspects that these studies have brought to the fore is the predominance of women as privileged artistic subjects for all of his activities, from photography to drawing and printmaking. 24 In so doing, this line of enquiry, too, cor-22 See also 2003.

Occultism
An additional and, for the purpose of this relatively concise overview, concluding example of how 'traditional' and 'philological' Capuana studies have been evolving both by revising the primary sources taken into account and by hybridising and merging with different methodologies, often 'imported' (from the Anglosphere), is constituted by the study of Capuana's interest in occultismo. The then popular theme of il mondo occulto, the unknown world of supernatural beings, the comprehension of which escaped (official) nineteenth-century scientific knowledge, was fundamental to Capuana's intellectual quest and well-represented in his entire oeuvre, but it has captured critics' attention only in recent times and only in a rather compartmentalised fashion. Nearly non-existent until the mid-Nineties, this line of enquiry inopment, works in itself as a supporting element for claiming, as this study aims to do, the centrality of female characterisation in the evolution of, and the changes within, Capuana's literary theory (and practice).
26 Enrico Ghidetti's L'ipotesi del realismo : Capuana, Verga, Valera (1982) still represents a good example of a critical tradition that has constantly explained female characterisation in a rather cursory and univocal way. It has highlighted Capuana's "accentuata predilezione per la psicologia femminile" (69), and acknowledged that, among his many female characters, "un posto eminente occupa […] Giacinta" (71). creased substantially following both Simona Cigliana's critical edition of Capuana's works related to Spiritualism (1995) and Mario Tropea's extensive exegetic work spanning two decades (1994,2000,2015). This interest engendered a particularly productive, progressive examination of Capuana's spiritismo-related practices in conjunction with the development of his artistic theories and, later, his fiction. 27 Capuana's short stories on the topic are countless and range -in Mario Tropea's words -"dalle teorie della reincarnazione [...] (1994,20). These short stories and their occulto-related themes have been investigated either individually or collectively by critics such as Della Coletta (1995), Leone (1998), and Tropea himself. Within the same investigative stream, other critics, such as Giannetti-Karsienti (1996), Loria (2006), Foni (2007) and Comoy Fusaro (2009, 79-160) 28 have progressively endeavoured to highlight the link between the occulto and the theory of art, by connecting Capuana's reflections on the mystery of the supernatural world with those on the impenetrability of the creative act. This line of criticism has very recently hinted at the link between the theme of the Occult and female characterisation, most explicitly in Michelacci's latest essay (2019), where the critic draws a parallel between Capuana's experiments with evocation, by means of a female medium, and his literary, naturalistic representations of female documenti umani. This threefold tangle of occulto, theory of fiction and female characterisation -however still undeveloped, especially regarding the limited spectrum of primary sources considered -will prove very useful as a foundation for the following portion of this study. It will function as a springboard for my analysis of Capuana's narrativisation of his theories as it emerges -with various degrees of clarity and sophistication -from his early work until his latest collections, completed and published well into the twentieth century.
In sum, what seems to have characterised the critical discourse in Capuana studies in the last few decades is a concerted attempt to reconfigure both the spectrum of Capuana's production and the variety of scholarly approaches to it, following criteria other than adherence to the principles and practices of Verismo. This approach has brought to light many lesser known texts by Capuana and led to a critical reas-27 The republication of the essay was followed by editions of some of his collections of short stories, such as Novelle inverosimili (1999b), Novelle del mondo occulto (2007) and Quattro viaggi straordinari (1992). These testify to the renewed interest in both occultismo and fantastico. On Capuana and the themes of 'otherness' and 'double', see also Pappalardo and Brunetti 1981.

• Capuana naturalista malgré lui: 'Classics' and 'New Turns' in Capuana Studies
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 36 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, 21-38 sessment of single works or even clusters of works, previously ignored or dismissed. Critics have also followed the numerous ramifications of Capuana's interests in order to highlight how the author's "production culturelle hybride" (Comoy Fusaro 2010) and his "sperimentalismo" (Storti Abate 1989, 107;Cenati 2007) have had a lasting effect on the Italian literary and cultural scene. The profile that emerges from this latest phase of Capuana studies is, in Corrado Pestelli's words, that of a "post-verista" author (Pestelli 1991, 14), who certainly played a key role as a theorist and fiction writer in the heyday of Verismo, but did not cease to contribute significantly to the literary debate once Verismo started to fade. In their analyses, most of these critics have not only foregrounded Capuana's experimentalism but also 'applied' their own, by deploying various and innovative critical approaches -ranging from enhanced philology to postcolonial theory and translation studies -and thus acknowledging the diverse and intriguingly complex nature of Capuana's production. In so doing, capuanistica has been further hybridised geographically, insofar as it has incorporated methodologies developed (as well as scholars working) outside the Italian academy for the most part. Moreover, the importance of both the theory-practice intersection and female characterisation as a "catalizzatore" (Cedola 2006, 160) have been progressively emphasised as being necessarily at the centre of any further investigation into capuanistica.
On these bases, this study sets out to further develop this phase of enquiry into the multifarious nature of Capuana's work. It does so from an angle -that of self-reflexivity -that is as apparently counterintuitive to the notion of Verismo (see above) as it is methodologically 'foreign' to the Italian tradition, but which is also self-evidently right at the core of the theory-practice-female characterisation tangle. The study therefore attempts to (re)examine in an ever more nuanced way how Capuana's experimentalism and eclectic interests respond to one another as well as to late nineteenth-century intellectual trends.

Structure of This Study
Following the way capuanistica itself has progressed in recent years, this study is organised along two main exegetic trajectories: one developing the questions of "gender and narrative" 29 -or, rather, the three-fold knot of gender, narrative and theory -in Capuana, and the other looking diachronically at the link and, as will become pro-29 This formula, taken from LHN, can be retailored specifically for Capuana: "The (historically contingent) ways in which sex, gender, and/or sexuality might shape both [Capuana's] narrative texts themselves and […] [his] theories through which readers and scholars approach them" (Lanser 2013). gressively apparent, the tension between theorisation and practice in Capuana's production.
As to the former hermeneutic link, Capuana studies as a whole have clearly and convincingly moved beyond an exclusive naturalista framework and towards a more articulate set of approaches, concerned with the nuances not only of Capuana's theory but also of his narrative techniques and his social conceptualisation. Yet the same cannot convincingly be said of the studies of his female characterisation. These remain, with a few, albeit notable, very recent exceptions, restricted to the works of the naturalist period: mainly Giacinta, Profumo and the racconti in-between. 30 Acknowledging recent intuitions on the theme of gender, in fact, is not to say that gender is now to be considered exhaustively covered by capuanistica. On the contrary, the overarching scholarly answer to the question of what part female characterisation plays in Capuana's narrative seems, after all, to have remained by and large quite univocal. Women are -the critical corpus seems to assert -either the primary focus (Giacinta, naturalist racconti, most of his theatrical pieces), or the collateral objects (Profumo, Il Marchese, La Sfinge) of Capuana's scientific études de femme. 31 It seems, in fact, that much work remains to be done with regard to periods and narrative works that are beyond the (perceived) boundaries of naturalismo and it is precisely this 'counter-canonical' route that the first part of this work will take, through the lens of 'metanarrative tension'.
On the other hand, as far as the theory-practice dichotomy goes, the sheer number of Capuana's creative and non-creative efforts has meant that there are still comparatively 'minor' works -or those perceived as such, for example the collection of short stories Fausto Bragia e altre novelle (1897), as well as the isolated autobiographical piece Ricordi di infanzia e di giovinezza ([1893] 2005) -to which insufficient critical attention has hitherto been paid. The second portion of the body of my analysis is devoted to this particular line of enquiry, once again through the lens of narrative self-consciousness.
Finally, in the context of the aforementioned 'grand' methodological shifts that have been taking place in capuanistica, one line of criticism does not seem to have been explored as thoroughly as it could be. One could argue that such an impressive corpus could potentially be approached along the lines of the increasingly pervasive methods that are commonly referred to as "distant reading" (Moret-30 Most critics seem to have retained the naturalist criterion even in addressing, for example, such characters as those of Agrippina Solmo in Marchese or Fulvia in La Sfinge, who would not belong to the naturalist phase from a rigidly chronological standpoint. Such characters, therefore, end up among the environmental causes -the Zolian milieu -or the symptoms of a pathology that triggers the (often) male characters' self-destruction.

• Capuana naturalista malgré lui: 'Classics' and 'New Turns' in Capuana Studies
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 38 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, 21-38 ti 2013). While the discursive nature and internal economy of this specific study do not lend themselves, in my estimation, to the direct application of Information and Communication Technology and Digital Humanities per se, 32 in the concluding part of the study I nonetheless attempt to retain the insights gained from the idea of distant reading, which are indeed those of distance and 'distancing oneself' (Moretti 2017) from the individual close reading of the individual text. I do so with the aim -once again, through the prism of self-reflexivity -of foregrounding overarching patterns and 'mapping' or 'charting' trends in a literary corpus -Capuana's -spanning over half a century and several hundred pieces of writing.  In order to adequately approach the theme of self-reflexivity in Capuana and to do so from angles that are relevant to some of the open questions of capuanistica -what place female characterisation and gender dynamics have in his theory and narrative and how the very relationship between literary theory and literary practice in Capuana's body of work is (re)negotiated across the decades -a few methodological/ terminological clarifications are in order before addressing the individual texts. Within the framework of the geographical and methodological hybridisations informing these reflections, such considerations are to be carried out through a comparison between the Italian academic context and the Anglosphere, which is where the study of selfreflexivity has been conducted most thoroughly. In particular, given that the literary tradition that will be dealt with here is the Italian one, it is especially beneficial, right from the outset, to highlight a discrepancy between the Italian and Anglo-American terminologies. Such a clarification also serves to support the choice of conducting this study (which is nominally published in Italy and by an Italian publisher, albeit in a digital-first, open-access manner) in English. The seemingly unproblematic and rather self-explanatory definitions of the popular Italian terms metanarrativa and metaromanzo, 1 used when referring to metaliterary tendencies that are commonly understood as characterising postmodernity and postmodernism -"a hallmark of postmodernism" for Neumann and Nünning (2014), but stemming from the modernist questioning of consciousness and 'reality' 2 -encompass at least two distinct compositional practices, which are often confused. Indeed, English-language narratology captures these nuances better than Italian, with two terms, metafiction and metanarration, as explained by Neumann and Nünning: Metanarration and metafiction are umbrella terms designating self-reflexive utterances, i.e. comments referring to the discourse rather than to the story. Although they are related and often used interchangeably, the terms should be distinguished: metanarration refers to the narrator's reflections on the act or process of narration; metafiction concerns comments on the fictionality and/or constructedness of the narrative. Thus, whereas metafictionality designates the quality of disclosing the fictionality of a narrative, metanarration captures those forms of self-reflexive narration in which aspects of narration are addressed in the narratorial discourse, i.e. narrative utterances about narrative rather than fiction about fiction. (2014) 3 ogy adopted by the relatively few Italian comprehensive works on self-reflexive narrative, which usually focus on the second (and some times on the first) part of the twentieth century, such as the pioneering study by Perniola (1967) and the more recent work by Patrizi (1996), Turi (2007) and Neri (2007). As far as studies in English on Italian selfreflexivity go, it is important to mention the 2015 special issue of The Italianist, which is particularly interesting for his non-and pre-modernist contents. 'Classic' contributions in English include Booth 1952;Scholes 1970;Bal, Tavor 1981;Prince 1982;Waugh 1984;Hutcheon 1987Hutcheon , 2001Barth 1982;Federman 2006;and Nünning 2004. For a more accurate overview, see Santovetti 2015, 315-16. See also Bianconi 2014, who focuses on the intersection between characterisation and metanarration through the analysis of the imaginary character of the writer in -with Rimmon-Kenan 2002 -the storyworld.
2 This is made explicit by the title of the second chapter of the by-now classic essay by Waugh (1984): "Literary Self-consciousness: Developments. Modernism and Post-modernism: The Redefinition". See also, for example, Masoni (2019): "The rampant experimentation in this period and attention to the role of the text as a tool for interpreting reality pushes modernist authors to manipulate their texts in ways that allow them to use the textual construct itself as a literary device. On the one hand, this means that there are acknowledgements in a novel that it is a novel, and acknowledgements in a play that it is a play. However, in addition to this kind of metatextuality, authors begin to manipulate the form of their texts in such a way that the novel or play itself almost becomes a character" (73). See also Cangiano (2018), who points to the intrinsic self-reflexivity that characterises Italian Modernism, "in questo lavoro [his] interpretata come autocoscienza speculativa del modernismo letterario" (15). See also Castellana: "[L]'ideologia postmodernista [...] ha spesso enfatizzato la continuità tra modernismo e postmodernismo proprio sotto l'aspetto dell'autoriflessività e del carattere metatestuale della letteratura" (2010, 25), who singles out Jameson (i.e. 2007) as an exception.
3 Santovetti expands upon this definition: "Metanarration is defined as the narrator's reflections on the act of narrating, while metafiction concerns the fictionality (that is, the artifice) of narrative. Metafiction -which may refer to specific techniques includ-The metafictional element intrinsic to the notion of metanarrativa, then, necessarily shatters the aesthetic illusion, interrupts and breaks the mimetic immersion of the reader, making the fictional nature of the story in which the reader is immersed evident.
On the contrary, it can be argued that the act or moment of metanarration, the metanarrative element within any given text, does not necessarily disrupt such an illusion, insofar as it works as a commentary on one or more aspects of the narrative practice. It does so by adapting itself to the plot of the text, however realistic it might be. To complement this terminological and conceptual range, it is important to mention Werner Wolf's work (2009). Wolf, aiming to indicate how both the aforementioned self-reflexive phenomena have an intrinsic multimediatic potential, uses the term metareference.
Given that all three of these terms and the concepts they define are useful when applied to Capuana, and do not have adequate equivalents in Italian, adopting this methodology partly determines the choice of the English language for this study.
One further category that has lately been associated with the discussion on self-reflexivity is the notion of autofiction. Elaborated by and large within the French academy, 4 this notion, as Olivia Santovetti puts it, also addresses the realm of self-reflexivity, yet from a slightly different perspective: [A phenomenon recently given the label of autofiction] is self-reflection in the literal sense of reflection of the self in texts that ambiguously mix fiction and autobiography. (Santovetti 2015, 310) 5 ing digression, metalepsis, mise-en-abyme, parody, intertextuality, metaphors, narrative embedding, authorial alter egos, dialogue with the reader, or representations of reading and writing -highlights the constructed nature of narrative, undermining its realism, and can therefore be conceived as 'fiction about fiction'. (Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveller, which starts, 'You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveller', is a typical example). In contradistinction, metanarration may even reinforce the narrative's illusion of authenticity and includes devices such as introductions and conclusions to storytelling (frame narratives) in which the narrator comments on the circumstances of the composition of the narrative, its content and/or reception (the metanarrative comments on the art of storytelling in Boccaccio's Decameron fall into this category)" (Santovetti 2015, 310). 5 The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms offers an equally basic yet serviceable definition: "A kind of novel or story that is written as a first-person narrative and that commonly presents itself fictionally as an autobiography of the narrator or as an episode within such an autobiographical account. Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) is one among many classic novels that fall into this category. The term emerged from modern French narrative theory, but has sometimes been borrowed in English" (Baldick 2008, 30).
Likewise, for Lorenzo Marchese (2014), author of the work that possibly gives the best account of the term autofiction -coined by French critic Serge Doubrovsky, with reference to his 1977 novel Fils -autofiction is "una forma paradossale" (2014, 7) which could be defined, albeit "con formula tutt'altro che esaustiva" as: Componimento in prosa di varia lunghezza in cui un autore scrive quella che in apparenza è la propria autobiografia, ma nel contempo fa capire attraverso strategie paratestuali e testuali che la materia della storia che si racconta è da interpretarsi come falsa, cioè non corrispondente alla realtà dei fatti avvenuti e non credibile come resoconto testimoniale […] la "storia vera" del discorso autobiografico si mostra come un'invenzione in alcune delle sue parti, e il paradosso di una storia insieme veridica e inventata è accentuato dal fatto che non è mai agevole, e in certi casi impossibile, discernere i fatti inventati da quelli invece avvenuti realmente. (7-8) While, as we will see, Capuana did not write a 'proper' autobiography as such, nor an overtly fictionalised one, there are nonetheless a few texts in his corpus that incorporate variously fictionalised autobiographical aspects. While the most obvious amongst those is certainly the juvenile and comparatively understudied Ricordi di infanzia e di giovinezza (1893), it will also become apparent how the hybrid notion of autofiction may become a useful exegetic tool in other portions of his work, to decipher some of Capuana's poetological reflections rendered in a narrative form.
While introducing the notion of metareference, Wolf's theorisation is also important to my objectives because it underlines the overall principle that self-reflexivity is "a gradable phenomenon" (Wolf 2009, 58), which depends on and varies according to many contextual factors. Predicting and measuring reader-response is particularly difficult, if even possible, because the response of a single reader to a specific textual trace or textual stimulus cannot be foreseen with certainty. There is therefore no way to guarantee -Wolf's argument suggests -that each and every self-reflexive instance will be recognised by all readers or read in the same way. By the same token, however, it is plausible to postulate, as this essay will do repeatedly, that the progressive self-reflexivity of a text or, more generally, an artwork is predictable: it can be maintained that, within a given text or a corpus of texts, the more elements that focus on the act of narration itself and/or direct the reader's attention to the compositional techniques of either that text or any other text, the more plausible it becomes to postulate that the text might be considered, on the whole, as a highly-self-reflexive artistic product.
Within this methodological and terminological framework, it will be possible to address the issue of self-reflexivity, or metareferentiality in Capuana's work, beginning by reviewing the most relevant instances. While the four concepts outlined above are all useful in relation to the whole of Capuana's oeuvre, none can be traced within Capuana's body of work in isolation, 6 with most of Capuana's works containing passages that are at once metafiction and metanarration, metareference and autofiction or different combinations of these. In other words, it would seem inappropriate to subdivide the book according to these rather slippery terminological definitions, so I have opted for a more holistic approach, whereby I will use the problems of capuanistica, such as female characterisation and the critical-creative production knot, to shape and organise the analysis of these narratological categories of self-reflexivity, rather than the other way around.
Before progressing to the close and then increasingly 'distant' analysis of the texts, one further methodological clarification is needed, one that stems directly from the strong focus on the narratological facet of self-reflexivity that I have highlighted thus far. As will become progressively clearer, the strong investigative bond offered by both the 'monographic' focus on Capuana alone and the notion of self-reflexivity itself, absorbs most of the exegetic 'thrust' of this research, which therefore cannot afford to venture into a broader genre-based discussion. That is to say, while this study aims to strip Capuana of a verista 'straight-jacket', it does not endeavour to put him into a new one, such as a hypothetical 'modernist' one. 7 By stopping short, so to speak, at the threshold of the aforementioned definition of "postverista", as elaborated by Corrado Pestelli, and going no further, this book's goal is not to rewrite the Italian genre-categories themselves 7 See recent studies on periodisation such as Mazzoni (2011, in English 2017 which -against the grain of the by-now well overcome Barriera del naturalismo theorised by Barilli (1964) -stresses the continuity and fluidity of the "transizione al modernismo" (Mazzoni 2011, 291): "La crisi del modello ottocentesco avviene dunque per tappe: fra il 1850 e il 1890, compimento e dissoluzione si mescolano dentro le opere degli stessi autori; a partire dagli anni novanta dell'Ottocento, la rottura inizia a prevalere; attorno al 1910 'cambia il carattere umano', l'arte perde la sua ovvietà e comincia l'epoca del pieno modernismo. Ma le metamorfosi che, tra il 1910 e il 1940, trasformano il volto del romanzo non giungono dal nulla: nascono quasi sempre da processi che erano già emersi, talvolta in modo vistoso, nel secondo Ottocento […] fra i tre momenti vi sono sovrapposizioni e ibridazioni continue" (307-8).
or even less 'rethink' an entire periodisation on the basis of one, however intriguing, case study and one, however (post)modernist, narrative element. What the study will strive to do is contribute to rethinking Capuana's position and, thereby, provide a starting point for those who may wish to address such a periodisation.  If one does a dance, it is not easy to indicate that one means to say something about the general practice of dancing. Others will assume that you are simply doing a dance, not producing a meta-dancing commentary (Rimmon-Kenan 1997, 12) As seen in the previous section, female characterisation in Capuana has been commonly understood -until very recently and with exceptions that still occur episodically -mainly as the testing ground for Capuana's theory, thus quintessentially 'a place of practice', as opposed to a place of narrative (meta)reflection. It is the creative locus in which Capuana puts into 'mimetic' literary practice the theoretical insights progressively developed in his numerous critical reflections: from the early work Il teatro italiano (1872) to the later collection Cronache letterarie (1899), which closes, with minor exceptions, the corpus of his major critical production. While that is certainly the case for Giacinta, Profumo and many of the racconti during his naturalist period, the aim of this chapter is to show that, in several crucial instances, the link between female characterisation and theory is deeper and diachronically more multifaceted than has previously been acknowledged. Strong hints towards such further, 'deeper' meaning of female characters are provided by Capuana's early short stories and this continues throughout his literary career. Female characterisations not only help, but even prompt him to articulate theoretically and negotiate the issues at the core of his (meta)literary thought: the form-content knot, the quasi-sexualised encounter between artist and form, and the historical progression of Art. While his very first work, the short story "Il dottor Cymbalus" ([1865] 1974a, 231-352), does not contain references to either female characterisation or self-reflexivity, traces of both appear in his first collection, Profili di donne (1877).

Delfina, Giulia, Fasma, Ebe, Iela, Cecilia... and the Struggle Between Form and Content
Profili, composed between 1872 and 1876 and published in Catania 1 by Fratelli Giannotta in 1877, was, in Giusi Oddo De Stefanis' words, "la prima opera organica di Capuana narratore" (1990, 81). It consists of six short stories relating brief and ill-fated love experiences, each titled with the name of a woman and recounted in a first-person narrative voice. Explicitly constructed as masculine, the narrative voice owns a different name in each portrait and narrates his experiences retrospectively, representing the only prominent male character in each profilo. The collection has been mostly, and, I maintain, rather flippantly, disregarded by critics. Nearly all major critical contributions, such as Scalia (1952), Madrignani (1970) and Davies (1979), have considered it a rather mediocre and uninteresting example of naturalist and psychological narrative. 2 The reasons for the overall dismissal by most critics lie ultimately in what all of them consider major mimetic weaknesses: an insufficient degree of descriptive complexity and verisimilitude in the way the characters, especially the numerous female ones, are conceived, for which the many French allusions try to compensate unsuccessfully. 3 In addition, the whole collection is assessed as lacking a cohesive principle linking the portraits to one another. This supposed anti-realistic 'fragmentation' and excessive Gallicisation leads Judith Davies to consider Profili excessively "disdainful of a plot" (Davies 1979, 22) and Michelacci to con-1 Composition dates are given only for "Fasma" (1874), and "Iela" (1876).
3 These reasons are well summarised by Giovanni Carsaniga: "Capuana's Profili di donne (Profiles of Women, 1877) is a series of portraits of women whose irredeemably conventional and novelettish style belies their pretence of psychological insight" (2003, 70).
However, it would appear that the collection has been assessed on the basis of what it lacks rather than what it contains. It has been considered simply as a preparatory 'draft' of Giacinta and Profumo, without reaching the level of naturalist analytical accuracy of the two novels: "il laboratorio dei Profili", as Michelacci has recently argued, "sta proprio a testimoniare la sua forma di 'incunabolo', di banco di prova per i concetti e per la forma narrativa breve dello scrittore siciliano. E si tratta in questa prima fase di uno studio prevalentemente fisiologico" (Michelacci 2015, 137). 4 Yet in recent years, many critics have come to touch upon the hypothesis that the most prominent elements in the collection might be actually those that hint at the presence of a (meta)artistic reflection in narrative form, albeit a quite rudimentary one, on the mode of literary/creative production, rather than the attempt to (re)produce 'verisimilarly' often pathological "psycho-sexual" (Davies 1979, 101) cases of masculine and, more frequently, feminine passions.
For Oddo De Stefanis, the protagonists of these Profili "sono tutte emblemi della donna in senso astratto " (1990, 82) and the central point of the collection is not that of depicting them in the most accurate way. Rather, the objective is to allow them to function as a (meta)narrative exemplification, depicting precisely the difficulties of representing/rendering on paper "una realtà enigmatica e sfuggente" (82). Similar considerations were proposed by Galvagno (2005), which I shall readdress below in relation to Spiritismo?, and by Forni (2015), for whom in "l'esperimento dei Profili [...] l'analisi della passione s'interseca con una filosofia delle 'forme' artistiche moderne" (86) in a way which is too overt not to be metareferential. 5 Since those readings touch upon, but do not delve into the selfreflexive element, it is appropriate to review in depth the most relevant textual instances, with the aim of better foregrounding the metareferential value. This will be done specifically in relation to the progression and increased level of sophistication of Capuana's theoretical thought, of which Profili constitutes the first stage. These tex-

• Gender and Self-Reflections Beyond the caso patologico
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 48 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, 45-84 tual instances are too numerous to be listed here, because the full breadth of intertextuality demands a separate discussion. 6 The focus here will be the way in which core theoretical points are articulated. The point of this analysis is to persuade the reader, following Wolf, of the collection's high 'self-reflexive coefficient'.
To start with, this collection of six short stories of unhappy love is anticipated by a prefazione -often either unduly ignored by critics 7 or mutilated by editors -that functions as a metanarrative framework, in which the narrator/author (Capuana) illustrates the fundamental characteristics of his art to the reader, thereby orienting their reading process: Due parole per dire al lettore che queste novelle sono state scritte con l'unico intento di farne un'opera d'arte […] sono delle sensazioni vere, dei sentimenti veri […], l'autore si è prodigato di renderli Taken in isolation from the text it introduces, this prefazione is nothing but a textbook paragraph of poetica verista. Yet, if read contextually with the six short stories that follow, it becomes what Ansgar Nünning defines as a "paratextual" metanarrative passage (Nünning 2004, 23), one that alerts the reader -at least implicitly -to the need to pay attention not only to the content and to the story but also to its discursive rendition (narration: I terminologically follow Rimmon-Kenan 2002): that is, how the author has technically succeeded in turning the inspiration derived from those allegedly 'true' emotions into an effective narrative.
It is with this level of awareness that readers will encounter a series of intertextualities, mostly Goethean-Faustian, but also Hegelian and, to a lesser degree, Shakespearean, which increasingly endeavour to semiotise the female character and bring her progressively closer to the literary form. In so doing, these intertextualities establish and progressively strengthen an allegorical parallelism between the complexity of the female character and the difficulty, in art, of reaching perfection in crafting the form. Intertextuality in these profili is not always a self-reflexive element in itself, but one that becomes 6 I discussed this topic more exhaustively in a philological piece on Capuana germanista (Zuccala 2019b).
7 Even Ghidetti, in his crucially important modern edition of Capuana's Racconti (1974) reports the text in a truncated version and set apart from the rest of the collection (Capuana 1974a, 3-5).

• Gender and Self-Reflections Beyond the caso patologico
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 49 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, 45-84 such -as in some of the cases examined below -when it steers and prompts the reader to focus on the fictional nature of what they are reading (see Wolf 2009, 63-5), shifting their attention from the mimetic level of the content to that of the composition.
In the opening scene of the first profilo -titled "Delfina" -the narrator-protagonist witnesses the scene of the waltz in the third act of Faust by Gounod (1859), 8 where Faust acknowledges his love for Margarete, whilst searching through the crowd for his lover. What follows is a linguistic signpost, one that works both in Italian and in German, pointing to the identification of woman and flower: "Quei popoli che chiamano il fiore e la donna con lo stesso nome hanno indovinato un mistero" (Capuana 1974a, 14).
This metaphor is part of a series of correspondences that align the manner in which Delfina and her lover acknowledge their mutual attraction, in the garden of Catania's Villa Bellini, to the way in which the same happens in The Garden scene in Faust I (15.3073-3205). In these texts, Margarete is both the name of the flower and the woman and, in Faust, Margarete realises that she loves Faust as she tears the petals off a daisy, playing the children's game of 'he loves me, he loves me not'.
Goethe appears again in the third profilo, in which Oreste, while gazing at the image of the mysterious guest, Fasma, finds himself thinking -"per una strana associazione di idee" -of "una di quelle serene e meravigliose pagine che Omero fra gli antichi e Goethe fra i moderni ebbero, quasi soli, la fortuna di poter scrivere" (Capuana 1974a, 59). Oreste then quotes a passage from the Iliad about the quasi-divine beauty and nature of Helen, who, in Faust, takes the symbolic role of guide towards the realm of ideal forms. Capuana's profilo, as Galvagno points out, engages very productively with the feminine  Goethe (1885) and Ettore Gentili's translation of Ettore Berlioz's La damnation de Faust (1846). In relation to Capuana's narrative, Goethe's name appears only in Folco Portinari (1976) and in Barnaby (2000). Portinari's portrait of the Marquis of Roccaverdina as "una sorta di Faust economico" (251) is expanded on by Barnaby's suggestion of a network of allusions to Goethe's Faust (110). No critics have mentioned Faust in relation to Profili nor has any critic focused on the connections between Capuana and the nineteenth-century German literary milieu. Interestingly, instead, some of the Profili were translated into German by Paul Heyse immediately after publication and included in his anthology of Italienische Volksmärchen (1914).
The link between Goethe's pre-text and female characterisation is further strengthened at the end of the portrait of "Ebe", in one of the most pathos-laden exchanges to be found in the collection. While the narrative voice, Alberto, recalls witnessing Ebe's death, a maxim by Goethe is quoted in combination with one by Hegel: Una sentenza dell'Hegel mi si presentava [...] limpidissima alla memoria, e me la ripetevo macchinalmente: "La necessità della morte è quella del passaggio dell'individuo nell'universale". Rammentavo un'altra sentenza del Goethe: "La nostra vita non è una vera vita, ma la morte della vita divina che viene ad estinguersi nella nostra. (1974a, 96) This is further evidence to corroborate the hypothesis that these intertextualities allude, in Profili, to a (meta)literary discussion -filtered by the feminine and, more generally, by gender-dynamics -of the ideal-real in art. This double quotation is also embedded in a Faustian frame, as the unfolding of the whole scene echoes The Prison at the end of Faust I. That scene portrays Faust as being torn between abandoning Margarete to be executed, after deflowering and inducing her to commit infanticide, or attempting to rescue her from prison. The same inner struggle is portrayed in the profilo, where Alberto finally opts for a reconciliation that might save Ebe's life. Alberto, as Faust, after a frantic drive in a carriage, reaches Ebe's sickbed only to witness her death. Ebe, as Margarete, in the last moments of her life, commends herself to God as her ultimate consolation: "Iddio le ha concesso una tranquillità ch'ella stessa non sperava. Dimenticata la terra, tutti i suoi pensieri sono ora rivolti al cielo", which "accoglie la sua anima afflitta" (1974a, 96). This image of salvation recalls Margarete's resignation to divine judgment: "Oh my God, I bow to your righteous judgment" and the voice from heaven announcing that she has found God (Goethe,Faust I 25.4605;25.4612) and has been saved. 9 9 In addition, Capuana's citations of Hegel and Goethe both recall lines from Goethe's poems. In the Hegelian quote, two verses of Goethe's philosophical poem "Eins und Alles" ["One and All"] resound: In boundlessness to lose and find | Themselves, the sin-

• Gender and Self-Reflections Beyond the caso patologico
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 51 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, Far from being a mere display of Capuana's erudition, these sophisticated intertextual 'dialogues' with the (two) classics strengthen the connection between the female characterisation in Profili and Goethe's masterpiece. The intertextuality, which insists on grouping together the woman and the work of art, can be better understood metareferentially when contextualised amongst the many Goethe-related notes scattered throughout Capuana's essays, bearing in mind, in particular, the way in which the topic of "the feminine" is dealt with in the littleknown essay, "L'eterno femminino" ([1885] 1994, 79-83). As noted by Scrivano (1994, 5-16), "sotto l'apparenza di divagazioni sul tema della donna nell'arte, con gli effetti di incanto e di sensualità ch'essa può generare" (9), the essay actually addresses "un aspetto centrale della riflessione di Capuana: quello del comporsi in unità dell'Astratto e del Concreto, o desanctianamente dell'Ideale e del Reale" (9). In "L'eterno femminino" (then also in Cronache 1899, 89), Capuana explains how the concluding image of Faust II, Das Ewig-Weibliche (5.23.12104-11) lends itself to an allegorisation precisely of those form-content and ideal-real relationships. In Goethe, according to Capuana, woman becomes the almost incorporeal principle through which universal values, often of an abstract nature, are explored (Capuana 1994, 81-2). "L'eterno femminino" describes the agency of the Eternal Feminine in Faust as passive and unconscious, whereby any "azione diretta, immediata, volontaria della donna amata sull'amante" (1994, 81) is excluded. It also points to the substantial interchangeability deriving from their instrumental role. Despite appearing in the fashion of 'living' characters, they all perform an equally allegorical function. For instance, when "Margherita" reappears at the end of the fifth act as "una poenitentum once known as Gretchen" (Goethe,Faust II 5.23.12069), "avrebbe potuto rappresentarla qualunque altra figura: la Magna peccatrix, la Mulier samaritana, la Maria Aegyptiaca, la stessa Mater Gloriosa" (1994, 82). Owing to their essentialised gender features, they all participate in Faust's grand allegory of human struggle towards "[l]'ignoto" and "[l]'ideale" (82). Therefore, the very reason for Margarete appearing in a worldly, 'realistic' fashion is that Goethe endeavoured not to overtly expose the figurative meaning of his characters: " [Goethe] voleva sempre dare […] qualcosa di concreto e di reale sotto cui l'astrattezza potesse nascondersi [...] e lasciare indovinare […] la sua arida essenza" (82). In Faust, as elsewhere, Goethe endeavours not to leave those values at the level of abstraction, but rather, to imbue them in living characters. 10 It is precisely this ability of masterfulgle are inclined (1983, 69, lines 1-2). The final tercet of the same poem seems to provide the reference for the second quotation from Goethe: The eternal works in all that's wrought: | For all to nothingness is brought | If changeless being is its will (lines 22-4).
10 This view is substantially shared by contemporary studies on the feminine in Goethe, amongst which see at least Jantz 1953, Hamlin 1994, Dye 2001. As Ellis Dye puts it,

• Gender and Self-Reflections Beyond the caso patologico
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 52 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, 45-84 ly merging form and content so as to bring the abstraction of the idea to life, that reveals Goethe's stature, "lo scrittore dalla forma perfetta" (Capuana 1882, 202): Le creazioni fantastiche, ed anche, se così vuolsi, le strane esuberanze della fantasia goethiana non riuscirono quindi un semplice ornamento poetico, sotto cui si cela il concetto filosofico dello scrittore [...], esse non ci scoprono la figura del poeta in lotta con l'idea astratta del suo tema ed affannato a concretizzarla, bensì ci appariscono esseri viventi. (Capuana 1872, 412) These critical pages follow Faust's fictional journey from the flesh to the spirit, from sensuousness to knowledge and from the female allegorical forms to the abstraction of Das Ewig-Weibliche. Faust's attempt to capture the abstract essence of what appears before him in a worldly fashion (as a concrete form of the abstract eternal feminine) in "L'eterno femminino" becomes an allegory of the "travaglio della creazione artistica" (Muoio 2019, 137) entailed in Goethe's fictionmaking process, to which "L'eterno femminino" looks from a readeroriented perspective. Its reader (Capuana) follows and enjoys Faust's path towards the Ideal 'mimetically', but meanwhile decodes Goethe's allegorising technique. In this way the reader can "indovinare" the abstraction concealed in Margarete's realistic forma (and in that of the other female characters) without losing anything of the aesthetic/mimetic experience. "L'eterno femminino" thus uses Faust's 'theme' of the Eternal Feminine as a springboard to illustrate how such a successful process of fiction-making and character-designing as Faust, works.
Capuana does something almost identical in Profili. Like "L'eterno femminino", Profili under "la sua apparenza di divagazioni sul tema della donna" (Scrivano 1994, 9) also conceals a poetological reflection. Yet, it does so narratively rather than in the form of an essay. Its 'theme' is neither the mechanics of love nor the depth and mystery of the female psyche, but rather the narrativisation of some crucial elements pertaining to his conceptualisation of the mechanics of fiction-making. All the women in Profili are equally participative in this tension between the abstract concept and the living character, as are Goethe's and Homer's female characters. Beneath the thin veil of the superficial realism of their depiction as suffering lovers, all of the female characters in Faust are either "type[s]" or "allegori[es]" or "symbol[s]" in a "chain of signifiers" (111) of the Eternal Feminine, for they embody "the Transcendence in the World, […] the Absolute in Nature [and] the Ideal in the Real" (102). Vittorio Mathieu notes that this unanimously acknowledged instrumental role of 'the Feminine' in Faust is tied to their characterogical traits. What characterises Faust's female figures is an "individuazione debole" (Mathieu 2002, 68), whereby "la donna è [per Goethe] meno individuata del maschio […] e semmai più individuante" (68). She is necessary for man's progressive self-individuation, acting as his Schopenhauerian "principium individuationis" (68).
What increases the self-reflexive 'coefficient' of the collection, triggered by all these predominantly metafictional elements of selfreflexivity, are the (many) explicitly metanarrative passages. The third profilo, "Fasma", is especially laden with such metacomments. Among the most obvious references is a literary text by Verga published shortly before Capuana's writing of the Profili (Galvagno 2005, 100). The eponymous protagonist finds her lover-narrator Oreste reading Eva (1873) and a debate ensues on the relationship between art and reality, of which the narrator recounts: L'immaginazione traduceva, interpretava, a suo modo quelle pagine appassionate. Eva e Fasma si confondevano bizzarramente: [...] l'opera dell'artista toglieva ad imprestito dalla realtà; la persona vivente dall'opera d'arte. (Capuana 1974a, 68) And Fasma herself, overwhelmed by raging jealousy, comments on the nature of the artistic product, which not only imitates but even outperforms reality: Quell'Eva par viva e commuove ed interessa e si fa amare come a una vera donna riesce di rado. Che infamia è l'arte! Possiamo noi entrare in lotta con la sua potenza, che spoglia la realtà da ogni triviale bassezza, da ogni accidentale stonatura e la rende immortale?! (Capuana 1974a, 69) In addition, the fact that an excerpt from this fictional argument refers to a historical debate in which Capuana was a participant, regarding whether the arts should bear a moralising message, further increases this metareferential coefficient. "Quel libro è cattivo", Fasma explains, and Oreste responds: "Credetti accennasse al falso concetto della moralità di un'opera d'arte che è in voga tra noi" (Capuana 1974a, 69). 11 The passage in which Fasma quotes from Romeo and Juliet seems to have a similar function. To Oreste, who is asking her name, Fasma elusively replies, in English: "What's in a name? … That which 11 See for instance Per l'arte, where Capuana comments on the critics' scandalised reactions to his Giacinta: "La gente avrebbe dovuto discutere d'arte, e si è messa a strillare per la morale" (1994,35).

• Gender and Self-Reflections Beyond the caso patologico
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 54 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, 45-84 we call a rose, | By any other name would smell as sweet!" (Capuana 1974a, 53). This Shakespearean intertextuality, too, serves "as a medium for poetological and aesthetic self-reflection" (Nünning 2004, 43) on the relationship between the concept and the object (il contenuto) and the literary sign (la forma) representing such a relationship.
Besides the specific contribution made by these self-reflexive instances to the coeval and historical debates -which one may even be inclined to consider rather vague and tautological at this stage -what all these passages make very clear, above all, is how at this point women are the privileged medium through which the metadiscourse on art of Profili (and elsewhere in Capuana) unfolds. Protagonist Oreste explains how art and woman are inextricably linked and how -in his relationship with 'the feminine' -"il sentimento dell'arte c'entr[i] spessissimo per più di tre quarti" (Capuana 1974a, 45). These love stories, which all end unhappily, come to represent allegorically that wrestling between form and content, and between writer and writing, that becomes a quasi-erotic dance where the form only extremely occasionally lends itself to the artist, and of which Capuana often speaks in his essays: Tra il concetto e la forma vi è una lotta continua; che la forma non arriva sempre a imprigionare nel suo organismo le mille gradazioni di un'idea. (Capuana 1880, 162) La Forma [...] cresce, si sviluppa, fiorisce e quando è pronta […] cerca e trova il fortunato individuo che le occorre [...] e gli si concede, in un fecondo abbraccio spirituale. (Capuana 1994, 47) 12 From the very early stages, then, it seems that in both Capuana's essays and (meta)narrative, the narrative/creative act is configured quite explicitly as an act of (masculine) possession triggered by erotic desire. The very association of desire and the creative spark, in turn, immediately calls into play the vast contemporary corpus of critical works, informed by psychoanalysis, "preoccupied with questions of desire" (Stanford Friedman 1998, 134). 13 Given, however, that this scholarly corpus largely pivots on the myth of Oedipus, this specific 12 See also Diario Spiritico (1870, first published in 1916); where the ghost dictates to Capuana what follows: "Creati, per così dire, un mondo a parte, e di tutti i cari fantasmi della tua immaginazione fattene dei compagni amorosi, e coltiva la loro compagnia come di amici reali" (1916, 340; emphasis added).

• Gender and Self-Reflections Beyond the caso patologico
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 55 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, link is best discussed in relation to the far more sophisticated novel La Sfinge, in which it is also far better metanarrativised. What is indeed relevant at this stage is that, as a consequence of linking female characterisation and fiction-making, Profili seems ultimately to talk primarily about fiction itself. It does so by narrativising intertextually and insistently what, in that chronological phase, is for Capuana the centre of the fiction-making process: the tension between form and content, 14 and the constant and often disappointing struggle of the artist to balance the concrete and the abstract, ideal and real in the literary form. In Profili none of the stories ends happily, as in none of these "abbracc[i] spiritual[i]" has the forging of the perfect characterological forma taken place. All of the women in Profili, these "figure gentili, forme aeree e tremolanti" (1877, VI), ultimately disappear without their 'essence' being fixed on the page as a forma viva. 15 The "Prefazione" had, after all, preemptively, self-reflexively conceded that "[l'autore] è riuscito imperfettamente, niuno [sic] lo sa meglio di lui" (VII), and the extreme difficulty of reaching such a Goethean balance and perfezione della forma is reiterated, one last time, as a metanarrative comment in "Ebe" by the narrator Alberto. He explicitly, yet wistfully, affirms: "Accade sempre a questo modo, nella vita, nell'arte, in ogni cosa; la giusta misura riesce impossibile e all'uomo e alla natura: è l'ideale che non arriva ad attuarsi" (Capuana 1974a, 88). 16 *** Albeit as stable and central as Capuana's focus on characters (see Michelacci 2015Michelacci , 2016, the concepts of personaggi as living embodiments of philosophical/poetological abstractions and an amorosa unione between forma and contenuto narrativised by Profili do not exhaust Capuana's multifarious 'narratology'. 17 In the twenty years after Profili, Capuana became increasingly articulate as a theorist and sophisticated as a (meta)narrator. Meanwhile, during those years, these themes are reworked over and over and to various degrees of detail in several short stories, where the ostensibly 'mimetic' quality of the love story underpinning the plot overshadows a selfreflexive preoccupation with the compositional labour. In the years 14 See Capuana (1872): "[È] tempo ormai di riguardar [...] con animo più tranquillo, e di stabilire tra la forma e il concetto quell'adeguata proporzione ed armonia che rendono ad un'opera letteraria la sua vera sembianza" (10). 16 See Zuccala 2019b.

• Gender and Self-Reflections Beyond the caso patologico
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 57 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, This is due to two personal qualities, which, combined, render the portrait of Profili's 'metaliterary' lover: on the one hand, his suffering/struggling nature, on the other, the fact that he is in constant search of an ideal in the real, despite -with Lukács -the daily 'prose' in which his ordinary (love) life unfolds. His short-lived, unsuccessful love quest takes on, albeit very briefly, the metanarrative quality of the ideal-driven, literary-poetic quests of the Faust-like narrators and protagonists of Profili. In these two early short stories there is little textual elaboration of the female characters, who, unlike Profili's, are both unnamed 20 and do not even appear physically. However, the gender dynamics as a whole -the 'love stories' themselves -acquire a self-referential tinge, in which the relationship between the lovers overshadows the relationship between concepts that are crucial, according to Capuana, to the art of fiction-making.
Along the same lines, particular emphasis is put on the "penoso lavorio" (Capuana 1888b, XXX-XXXI) of the creative struggle, in two short stories composed significantly later, towards the end of the Eighties. The device of the epistolary exchange, 21 intermittently attempted in Profili, is deployed more thoroughly in "A una Bruna" (1887). Here, seven letters are reproduced "Dalle lettere di Giorgio ****" -an 'evocative' name (see Sardo 2017 and more comprehensively Muoio 2019, 140) 22 that d'Annunzio had made famous since Tigre Reale (1875, G. La Ferlita) and would reuse in a few years time in Il Trionfo della morte (1894). The one-sided exchange between the male lover Giorgio **** and his mistress is intertwined with metanarrative reflections on transmedial artistic composition. Giorgio's metacomments range from the insufficiency and inadequacy of photography as a truly artistic method 23 -a cogent topic in fin-de-siècle 'verista vs antiverista' debates 24 and here entwined with speculations on the passing of time and the afterlife 25 -to the discussion of occulti phenomena. Occultism emerges 20 For the link between name and character see Barthes: "When identical semes traverse the same proper name several times and appear to settle upon it, a character is created" (1974,67).
21 For an overview of the links between epistolary fiction and aesthetic illusion, see Koepke 1990.
22 Muoio focuses on the relevance of the change of name from Renato to Giorgio (Muoio 2019, 140).

• Gender and Self-Reflections Beyond the caso patologico
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 58 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, as particularly prominent, with the description of a (fictional?... imagined?... dreamed?... hallucinated?) visita spirituale turning into Giorgio's longing for an actual, either physical or 'spiritual' visitation from his interlocutor. The artistic quality of this tangle of reflections and speculations is enriched by Shakespearean quotations (so common in Capuana's Profili) and references ranging from Plato to Swedenborg's latest scientific publications. This multilayered, if unsystematic, allusive narrativisation of quasi-artistic phenomena peaks, once again, in a most explicit metanarrative comment, with the acknowledgment of both the centrality and the unattainability of the form-content knot: Volere o non volere, il passaggio del concetto pensato nella forma letteraria, anche in questa, umilissima, epistolare, è proprio uno sforzo, una fatica da far disperare … Ah, se sapeste che bei libri ho qui composti in certi quarti d'ora, all'ombra di un ulivo, sdraiato sull'erba!... E come me li sono goduti, solo solo, cogli occhi socchiusi, fumando una deliziosa sigaretta, felice di pensare che non avrei dovuto mai scriverli, mai!... (Capuana 1897a, 195-6) In the midst of all this lies the semiotisation of Woman, who is no longer just the Giacinta-like case study to be dissected under the microscopio and bisturino of the "scienziato dimezzato" (Capuana 1994, 30) that is the naturalist writer. After all, a woman acquires enough 'active' literary agency to trigger mystery, temptation… inspiration.
The tragic undertone of this metaliterary love links it to two short stories published a few years later, "Fausto Bragia" (1897a, 1-50) and "Ofelia" (1897a, 89-108), both released in 1893 and both featuring a prominent component of female character-centred metanarration. The eponymous protagonist of "Fausto" is a thirty year-old decadent artist, à la Andrea Sperelli, and one amongst a significant number of Capuana's musician characters, who tries to rivitalise his stagnating musical inspiration by experiencing real passion for an aristocrat, "la non mai sospettata signora Ghedini" (Capuana 1897a, 2). Passion soon wanes, overshadowed by another and temporarily more powerful attraction for a younger woman, one who is also seemingly more useful to his art: "La graziosa civetteria di Cornelia lo eccitava, gli risvegliava nell'animo la passione della musica, se non la scintilla creatrice del compositore" (1897a, 30). The artist ends up committing -not a fashionable suicide like the protagonist of Il piacere (1889) -but a homicide to reach that meta-artistic objective, in what is, for Barnaby, a polemical attempt to resituate the decadent artist in the material and bourgeois context (2004,17). "Ah, la terribile idea! […] A quali infami accessi lo riduceva colei, spingendolo alla disperazione con la insopportabile gelosia!" (1897a, 34). The crescendo of Fausto's homicidal delusion -to be carried out by means of a poison stolen from a doctor-friend's cabinet -is mirrored in metaliterary terms, through the parallel conceptualisation of a sinister sinfonia: -Mi hai fatto paura!esclamò il dottore, stupito di quell'aspetto sconvolto, di quegli occhi che luccicavano sinistramente evitando lo sguardo altrui, di quelle parole pronunziate ora a scatti, ora esitando. (Capuana 1897a, 38-9) Fausto's delitto, however, is doomed to remain uncommitted. The poisonous candy prepared for his lover ends up in the hands of her husband, who dies after consuming it, and thus, in a twist of fate, leaves her free to marry Fausto himself.
Similarly, in "Ofelia" the (anti)'hero' is the renowned painter Procci 27 who, in the opening scenes, charges himself with murder:"-In che modo? Perché l'ha uccisa? -Per gelosia. L'ho annegata" (Capuana 1897a, 90). He writes, in the form of a confession to a police officer, of how he has been looking for artistic inspiration in a 'real' woman, with whom he falls in love and of whom he becomes morbidly jealous. The starting point is once again an abbozzo, for which Procci is seeking a worthy model in a Rome dense with Dannunzian echoes. Here too, a metaliterary attack is detected, however poorly performed (Barnaby 2004, 18-9), on the fashionable motifs of d'Annunzio, the Uberman and the aestheticisation of life: "E che amavo in costei, che cosa? La sua bellezza, il suo fascino, oppure la mia opera d'arte, di cui ella era la riproduzione vivente, quella maledetta Ofelia sognata, idolatrata due anni con la gran passione dell'artista per la propria creatura?" (Capuana 1897a, 102). Here, too, are references -"il mago Donato" -to the fashionable fin-de-siècle circle of sedute spiritiche that features in the work of coeval writers ranging from Fogazzaro (Piccolo mondo antico, 1895) to Pirandello (Il fu Mattia Pascal, 1904). 28 Exposed to this cultural temperie, Procci decides to hypnotise the woman, not to force her to be faithful, 29 but to extract an honest confession. When the suspected betrayal is confirmed, hypnosis turns into a deadly weapon in the hand of a now completely humiliated Procci -"Io udivo poco; capivo pochissimo... Il cuore mi scoppiava..." (Capuana 1897a, 105) -and the artist is able to mesmerise the woman into drowning herself in the sea. The murder happens in the form of a double killing of both the artwork and the woman so as to stress the duality of the story: 27 "L'ultimo suo quadro ebbe l'onore d'essere comprato da Sua Maestà il Re, all'esposizione della primavera scorsa" (Capuana 1897a, 94).

• Gender and Self-Reflections Beyond the caso patologico
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 61 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, 45-84 E nello stesso tempo, rivedevo il mio quadro: Ofelia che affonda lentamente nella riviera tranquilla; Ofelia coronata di fiori, ancora sorretta a fior d'acqua da le vesti che le si gonfiano attorno... E vedevo pure Anna. La vidi sbalordire, smarrirsi, venir meno, affondarsi e sparire fra l'ondata che avvolse tutti in quel momento... (Capuana 1897a, 107) 3.2 "Evoluzione"'s Fasma and a 'Small (Metatheatrical) Archive of the Heart' The rather monothematic metareflection(s) of the aforementioned works -revolving around the theme of seizing the form -begins to be rearticulated in a more substantially multifaceted guise in two critically overlooked, female characterisation-centred short stories from the Eighties. After the first edition of Giacinta and two important collections of critical essays, Studi sulla letteratura contemporanea (Prima and Seconda serie) -"tra i quali si annoverano i memorabili saggi su Zola Balzac, Verga, Dossi" (Ghidetti 1974, XXX) -we encounter the short story "Evoluzione" ([1883-84] Capuana 1974a, 406-26). This story features a (relatively) newly married couple, Oreste and Fasma, two "transtextual characters" (Richardson 2010) who unmistakably echo Profili. 30 At a structural level, and even before considering the narrative/story, what strikes the reader is the number of framing devices Capuana-the narrator experiments with, largely by subdividing the text into sections belonging to different 'genres'. The four sections consist of either an indirect narrative or (fictional) reproduction of fragments of correspondence between the two spouses. This quite lengthy piece opens with a narrative section, "Anniversario" (406-10), in which Oreste and Fasma are portrayed together, enjoying early spring. While the two spend a few days in the country, he is, in fact, emotionally distant and thinking about the sixteenth 'anniversary' not of his marriage, but of his past love for Iana (reminiscent of Iela in Profili). His rêverie unfolds along the self-reflexive lines of sogno-realtà and ideale-reale, which had become so central to Capuana's work since Profili. non osava confessarle che in quel momento il dolce sogno del suo primo amore si era confuso con la bella realtà tremante di commozione fra le sue braccia! (Capuana 1974a, 410) After "Anniversario" has thematised the sogno-realtà dichotomy, the second section steers this still seemingly 'abstract' discussion about past lovers and the way distant memories of them resurface, onto a more explicitly literary ground, by reproducing excerpts of Oreste's notebook ("Dal taccuino di Oreste", 410-16); the effect is that of weakening, at this point, mimetic immersion and illusion, both by shifting from 'unframed' third-person narration and by now referring to what is in fact a piece of fictional text within the text: Le imposte della sala erano tempestate di nomi, di date. Altre persone che si volevano bene […]. C'erano anche dei versi del Byron, che ora più non rammento. -Chi può essere questa Jenny […] ? -Una vecchia zittellona brutta, sdentata, dagli occhiali verdi -dicevo io. -Una miss Chiaro-di-luna -dicevi tu. Sciocchezze! […] [C]i venne l'idea di scrivere anche i nostri nomi su quell'album di legno verniciato. E tu scrivesti: Fasma (nome di adozione) col tuo bel caratterino. Io, Oreste, con le mie orribili zampe di gallina; e mettemmo la data, data indimenticabile! […] Ti rammenti che io vi scrissi alcuni versi in lingua russa che tu volesti tradotti? "Ho visto passare l'Amore | Con un gran fascio di cure. -Dammene, Amore, -gli dissi -Dammene un po' -Ma egli tirò diritto". Sì, sì, versi russi, cara mia! Invece erano motti foggiati lì per lì, di nessuna lingua, senza alcun senso, che io ti tradussi sfacciatamente a quel modo. Quando penso che qualche tourist li copierà per cercare di farseli tradurre anche lui! (Capuana 1974a, 414-15) Besides the striking temporal ambiguity generated by the uncertainty regarding whether the 'you'-addressee in the excerpt is his wife or his lost love, what is further intriguing in terms of textual 'self-consciousness' (Waugh 1984) is that the content of this excerpt is itself, to a large extent, metanarrative. The metanarrativity of this passage is increased through a passing reference to Byron, for example, and, more importantly, by mentioning an episode of pseudo or 'ludo'-translation of imaginary "versi russi" that, Oreste reveals, were nothing but his own creations disguised as translations. For any coeval reader acquainted with Zuccala 3 • Gender and Self-Reflections Beyond the caso patologico Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 63 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, 45-84 the literary scene, or for a contemporary scholar, this is a rather overt reference, well beyond the fictional realm of the storyworld, to Capuana's own pranks played on the literary scene of the time, particularly to the "pseudo traduzione parodica" (Fulginiti 2014b, 150) that he had written a few years earlier, later published in Semiritmi (1888a) and discussed in the collection Per l'arte (1994,. The text was first published in 1882 in Fanfulla della domenica with the initials G.P., but in the 1885 essay "Un poeta danese", Capuana explained the prank, intending to satirise "i tanti pretesi cultori di letteratura straniera che in Italia traducono, o fingono di tradurre, da tutte le lingue europee moderne" (1994,138). "È inutile aggiungere", Capuana continues, che, come non è mai esistito un poeta danese chiamato Getziier, così sono un'invenzione i canti che si dicono tradotti e i giudizi dei critici citati. Al Fanfulla della domenica giunsero parecchie cartoline che incoraggiavano il presunto traduttore; nessuna che avvertisse il giornale di essere stato messo in mezzo da un burlone. Se qualcuno dei tanti nostri traduttori di traduttori [emphasis added] di poeti stranieri ha già, per caso, versificata la mia prosa, ora è pietosamente avvertito. (Capuana 1994, 138) 31 Capuana uses this escomotage both to criticise the Italian habit of subserviently, almost obsessively, translating foreign poetry -implying also the principle of the language ethnicity and the 'dogma' of untranslatability 32 -and to experiment with a then virtually nonexistent verso libero (Fulginiti 2014b, 143, drawing on Lombez 2005and Miliucci 2014, 3). While in "Evoluzione" there is no breach, at this stage, of the veil of mimesis (the actual historical burla on Capuana's part is not mentioned), the allusion would be apparent to any reader of either Fanfulla della domenica or, from 1885, Per l'arte.
In the section "Presentimenti" (1974a, 416-21) the narrative pace/ mode reverts to extradiegetic narration -describing Fasma's illness and her questioning of her husband's feelings -and then leaves room for one further, epistolary section, comprising three letters, two to his wife Fasma, within which the one to his friend Giorgio is nested. This framing structure juxtaposes truth and mystification in a way 31 See also Miliucci (2014, 3), who explains the possible reasons for deploying such a device: "La traduzione da autori stranieri, specie se fittizia, è un espediente per cui vengono a scontrarsi in una terra di nessuno prosa e poesia, anticipando un movimento tipico del passaggio fra i due secoli, e aprendo lo scenario a una terza via che sembra costantemente in controluce nella nascita di ritmi nuovi". On this episode see also Fulginiti 2014a and 2014b.

• Gender and Self-Reflections Beyond the caso patologico
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 64 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, 45-84 which is in itself enticingly self-reflexive: in the two letters to his wife, the portrait of a devoted husband is evident, one who is disappointed to be kept away from his spouse by business obligations. Yet in "A Giorgio B***", Oreste surprisingly writes: "Con mia moglie è andata benissimo. Sono stato un commediante di prim'ordine, sublime a dirittura" (1974a, 424) and then discloses the stratagem that allowed him to spend time with his mistress Gilda. 33 He describes his 'performance' when, after receiving the letter from a fake client Bucci, the sending of which has been orchestrated with a friend, he pretends he must immediately depart and head back into town. The juxtaposition of 'reality' and fiction, both embedded in what is very clearly an 'artwork' (a fictional letter embedded in a sequence of letters, in turn embedded in a multi-section short story) stresses the importance of fictionality itself, both in dealing with a marital situation and, more fittingly, in dealing with writing: writing not only 'constructs fiction', but re-creates reality in some sense. In 1883-84 Capuana's thought is still at a relatively early stage, but this will become a crucial principle from Per l'arte onwards. For Madrignani, from Capuana's theorisation it emerges how: La realtà illusoria che l'artista deve saper imporre [...] ha l'apparenza dell'altra realtà senza esserne la copia, ed anzi superi la natura attraverso una ricercata naturalezza artificiale. (1970, 120-1) As Scrivano points out: "L'idea dell'opera d'arte come organismo succedaneo e parallelo [e superiore] della realtà è forse il più alto punto che la riflessione critico-estetica di Capuana raggiunse" (1994, 15). Capuana himself is quite explicit about the fact that his art "non sarà mai la fotografia" (1882, 129) but rather re-creation, mediated not only by reflection -as it is inevitable in a time of massive scientification and medicalisation of culture -but also by fantasia and immaginazione: Dal momento che la realtà passa nel mondo della rappresentazione artistica, ha già perduto qualche cosa della sua natura materiale, e non è più precisamente quale può vedersi aprendo gli occhi; è più elevata. (Capuana 1994, 165) However, on the basis of the already prominent self-reflexive (metafictional + metanarrative) aspect of the work, it could be argued that the structure of "Evoluzione" itself stages not the sentimental evolution suggested by the title, but rather the repeated sequences of 'unframed' narrative-'paratextual' narrative, suggesting an evolution in 33 A mistress named Gilda is to be found in the late novel Rassegnazione (1907). Here too the name refers to one of the protagonist's short-lived Milanese affairs.

• Gender and Self-Reflections Beyond the caso patologico
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 65 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, 45-84 the direction of, and a systemic gesturing towards, self-reflexivity. "Evoluzione" then represents, in a certain sense, a progression from Profili's insistence on the sole theme of forma and contenuto, insofar as it introduces -albeit in an extremely allusive, undeveloped fashion -another, and somewhat broader, crucial path of metareflection on the evolution and macro-shifts occurring in 'genres' and 'kinds' of literary production, in which the notion of realtà ricreata is also imbued. While in these early stages this macro-progression is still in nuce, by the end of this study it will be seen to reveal a pattern that allows one to account diachronically for the entirety of Capuana's artistic experience.
Whilst compiling another very major critical (non-fictional) collection -the pivotal Per l'arte (1885) -Capuana returned to creative writing with a short story that deserves more attention than it has hitherto received, and for reasons akin to those that make "Evolutione" an extremely intriguing piece of self-reflexive writing. The short story "Il piccolo archivio", 34 which is dismissed by Ghidetti as nothing better than an "esercitazion[e] salottier[a]" (Ghidetti 1974, XXXIV), displays its metanarrative content in a very articulate manner. The title itself suggests a connection with the notion of meticulous storage, if not production, of 'literary' materials more explicitly than "Evoluzione" does. The case of this specific short story is rendered even more interesting because of its "transmodalisation" (Genette 1997, 277-8 andBoselli 2011, 53). It exists, as a "giocattol[o] a doppio fondo" (Zappulla Muscarà 1984, 169), in both a novelistic and a theatrical version, published in 1886: the atto unico "written before the short story with the same title, [yet] […] published later" (Boselli 2011, 64 andRaya 1969, 72). 35 The short story -whose latest title is the self-explanatory "Visita" (Raya 1969, 72) -is, once more, about two lovers 'captured' by the narration during one of their last meetings, before parting due to Maria's husband being transferred to Napoli. Maria comes to Ludovico's home while he is arranging his archivio of little collectables -"fiori secchi, lettere ingiallite, pezzettini di nastri, gingilli" (Capuana 1974a, 362) -which remind him of his diverse range of past flirtations: the daughter of his fattore (in 1866), then a classy woman, then an eager letter-writer, then a marchesa. This display irritates the nameless guest, who fears that the same destiny of 'public' revelation could be reserved for her own letters. She leaves embittered, hence revealing the actual depth of her now-betrayed feelings. 34 Dated 1884, published in 1885(and Raya 1969, 70, entry 1026 and later included in Le appassionate ([1893] 1974a, 362-74).

• Gender and Self-Reflections Beyond the caso patologico
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 66 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, The most interesting insights into what appears as an otherwise entirely unexceptional 36 story are provided by Stefano Boselli. The critic focuses not so much on the short story itself, but on the play composed just before (Capuana 1999c, 3-12). He does so from the (often self-reflexive) perspective of intertextuality, building on a comparison with Verga's "Cavalleria Rusticana" (short story: 1880, 125-40, the play premiered in 1890), which is corroborated by paratexts where Capuana comments on its adaptation and vice versa. As a way of emphasising the versatility of the one-act format, Boselli points out that, while, on the one hand, in the context of realism, the one-act play was appreciated for its 'hypnotic' qualities, which allowed the hiding of the author's presence in a quintessentially verista fashion, on the other hand, the short play "offers a precious alternative, with a stronger role of intertextuality, at the theatre" than longer plays, which are inherently weaker when it comes to the presence and relevance of intertextuality (Boselli 2011, 51). Boselli continues: Thanks to its brevity, [the one-act play] […] may be used as a flexible tool that can dramatise dialogue between works before the eyes of the spectators, in the here and now of the performance […]. By staging at least two short plays within the same event, a director is in the position to offer not an authorial sentence, but a series of utterances and a vision of dialogic interrelation, thereby leading the audience to ponder the larger intertextual matrix. (51) The one-act play has an intrinsic self-reflexive potential, then, that can be exploited as much by a hypothetical 'director' as by a scholar seeking to find metareferential comments/traces. In the play, as in the text, "piccolo archivio" refers to the cataloguing of his lovers that the protagonist maintains -"il riordinamento del vostro piccolo archivio del cuore" (Capuana 1999c, 19) -through examining, one by one, the items that remind him of a specific woman. And yet, the purpose of this spolio is more subtle: "Il piccolo archivio is remarkable […] as a collection of layers and motifs within an intricate intertextuality that connects not only to the Verismo school, but also to the dramatic tradition, which Capuana knew well thanks to his job as theatre critic" (Boselli 2011, 65). Firstly, the piece incorporates many explicit transmedial hints, "including writers Byron, Sévigné,Fogazzaro,and painters Raffaello and Correggio" (65). Even more crucially, it is the enumeration of "love samples" themselves that, for Boselli, contributes to metanarrativity: each love piece is linked 36 For Pasquini: "Due personaggi, due amanti, come ce ne sono tanti nella letteratura e nel teatro ottocentesco" (Capuana 1999c, 8).

• Gender and Self-Reflections Beyond the caso patologico
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 67 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, both to a 'type' of female individual 37 and, through it, to a theatrical tradition beyond realism: His first woman was the daughter of his steward. When he comments "Allora amavo il rustico, l'ideale dell'ideale!" (20) he is in fact referring to the utopian portrayals of Arcadian societies that influenced the theatre as well. The next woman, the first real "lady" belonging to modern times, "fu così bestia [...] da provocare il mio rivale e buscarmi un bel colpo di punta al braccio, guaribile in dieci giorni" (21). It is easy to associate the events with Cavalleria, with the exception that the "hero" here did not (could not?) die. The third episode was an opportunity for Federico to vindicate himself of feminine volubility ("Tradii per tradire" 21) and reflects the tradition of bourgeois drama the verists were trying to supplant. Finally, the last abandoned woman is a clear example of emotional excesses: she writes too much and in a style suitable for Fogazzaro, but might at the same time anticipate D'Annunzio. […] All the letters (i.e. types of sensibility and dramatic types) have now found their place in the little archive, and the play is actually a hypertext that not only alludes to, but playfully satirises the texts it quotes […]. We are reminded of Capuana as critic: "C'incalza ancora l'accademia, l'arcadia, il classicismo e il romanticismo. Continua l'enfasi e la retorica, argomento di poca serietà di studi e di vita. Viviamo molto sul nostro passato e del lavoro altrui. Non ci è vita e lavoro nostro" (Il teatro xxi-xxii). (Boselli 2011, 65-6) Therefore, Boselli concludes, "Capuana's play alludes to the other ["Cavalleria Rusticana"] directly and attempts to archive it" (68) in a way that is eminently self-reflexive, as an archivio not so much of love memories, but rather of literary and, specifically, theatrical forms. As in "Evoluzione", the focus of this (meta)reflection seems gradually to become broader, to go from the particularity of the quasi-sexualised act of creating fiction to the more ambitious reflection around liter-37 I borrow here from Capuana himself: "Noi creiamo dei tipi! -dice lei. Peggio per loro. Il tipo è cosa astratta: è l'usuraio, ma non è Shylock; è il sospettoso, ma non è Otello: è l'esitante, il chimerizzante, ma non è Amleto, e via via. Potrei facilmente moltiplicare gli esempi; ragionando con lei, basta un semplice accenno. Dei tipi! Ma tutta la letteratura moderna è la negazione di questo principio estetico classico, già sorpassato; lo afferma involontariamente lei stesso quando parla di individualismo. L'arte, sissignore, oggi crea (quando riesce a crearli) individui, non tipi. L'artista moderno si è convinto -e a questo convincimento l'ha indotto la scienza -che ogni creatura umana è un mondo a parte, immensamente ricco, immensamente vario, quasi altrettanto infinito quanto l'universo" (Capuana 1898, 46).

• Gender and Self-Reflections Beyond the caso patologico
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 68 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, 45-84 ary forms as such and their interrelation. If that is the case, though, it raises the question of what the subsequent shift to narrative form might signify. In fact, the primary concern is whether the short story not only 'archives' preceding dramatic forms but also the theatrical form itself. After all, Capuana had declared the demise of (Italian) theatre very early on: "Nella storia dell'arte drammatica la nostra parte noi l'abbiamo già avuta [...] il vero, l'unico teatro italiano fu già la commedia dell'arte" (1872, XXV). Boselli's sophisticated appraisal fails to acknowledge that, in Capuana, this reflection is central and philosophically grounded in a Hegelian framework of historical progression, which only fully manifests itself (meta)narratively a few years later. What is significant here, in anticipation of that discussion, is that in the transition to the novella -a transition that, according to Luciana Pasquini (Capuana 1999c, 8) is "più semplice del previsto […] [i]l passaggio da un genere all'altro è pressoché automatico" -there is the addition of a further and fundamental layer, which appears to bracket the theatrical art form itself. Nevertheless, it is only in La Sfinge that this very point is made metanarratively in a convincing manner and is therefore best discussed in full in relation to that novel.

L'Ignota, Faccia Bella and Female 'Visitations'
The twofold piece, "Il piccolo archivio", is a testament to both metareference and transmediality (from short story to theatre). In Capuana, self-reflexivity traverses both media and genres, being able to reach and infiltrate seemingly non-fictional and (quasi)autobiographical writing. In this category, firstly, one finds the very highly cited Spiritismo? (1884). 38 On the surface, Spiritismo? is a long essay, dedicated to Salvatore Farina, on the manifestations of the Occult such as medianic "comunicazioni e apparizioni" (Capuana 1884, 1). 39 Yet, one notices how its argument frequently unfolds through the parallels between these pretended and mysterious supernatural phenomena and the equally mysterious processes of artistic creation (see Giannetti-Karsienti 1996;Galvagno 2005;Mangini 2007;Foni 2007). The eminently literary quality of the piece can be seen in the very first lines, where the opening quotation comes not from a medical/scientific treatise, as one might expect from Capuana's previous practice, but from his beloved Shakespeare, often used for (meta)narrative purposes: 38 This was composed in a decade rich in narrative works (at least three renditions of Giacinta -'79, '86, '89 -, the composition of Profumo, racconti appassionati), but in which the self-reflexive production is scarce.
39 See Tropea 1994 and Cigliana 1995 for a contextualisation of the work and a critical commentary.

• Gender and Self-Reflections Beyond the caso patologico
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 69 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, | Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet, I. 5 (Capuana 1884, 1) Then, after a passing review of some recent publications in the field of Spiritualism the text quickly turns to the topical issue of scrittura medianica, one that is closer to Capuana's own creative interests. The essay recounts how Capuana began by performing experiments of magnetism/mesmerism and hypnotism on the landlord's daughter in Firenze (1864), and how he soon tried to turn her into a means through which he could 'produce' literature: Covavo, da mesi, una Vita di Ugo Foscolo, il mio idolo letterario giovanile, ed ero arrabbiatissimo di certe lacune incontrate qua e là, che non trovavo modo di riempire [...]. Fu così che mi venne la cattiva idea d'indirizzarmi allo stesso Foscolo, facendolo evocare dalla Beppina. (Capuana 1884, 93-4) The description of his own, 'literature-driven' experimentations with magnetism then leads to a journalistic reportage of variously documented episodes of somnambulist writing. The metaliterary, selfreflexive quality of the work peaks at the centre of the collection. Within an argument that supposedly demonstrates the existence of the Occult, Capuana places an anecdote, presented as autobiographical, of a "caso di allucinazione artistica [...] complicata" (Capuana 1884, 226). Here the author (Capuana) recounts how, after seeing Van Dyck's painting Ritratto d'ignota in a museum in 1875, he is haunted by that image, which demands to be accepted and loved as a 'real' woman would: Ogni notte [...] la fantasticata allucinazione della novella diventava quasi una realtà. Sentivo in quello stanzone di Via Ripetta la presenza della Ignota. [...] Aveva un tal fascino che io non sapevo più resisterle. (Capuana 1884, 232, 235) The anecdote, writes Capuana, gave him the idea for a "novella fantastica" revolving around precisely this phantasmagoric 'persecution'. And yet, although tormented for days by the phantom of his inspiration, he cannot -unlike what, to some extent, happens in Profili -convincingly incorporate the feminine inspiration into the literary form: Un bel soggetto di novella fantastica! Sì... Ma la chiusa? La catastrofe? E mi addormentavo nel cercarla. E così ogni notte, da capo, vivevo per qualche mezz'ora in uno stato strano, né di completa realtà né di allucinazione completa; talché, a volte, non sapevo più distinguere se fosse l'idea della mia novella che mi producesse quella piccola allucinazione, o se quell'idea fosse la semplice Zuccala

• Gender and Self-Reflections Beyond the caso patologico
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 71 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, 45-84 ponent, rather like that of Profili. This is further corroborated by the fact that even the main claims for autobiographical truth are on occasion undermined by hints of the narrator's unreliability: "Senti, caro Farina; io ti racconto l'impressione schiettissima del fatto, come fu allora provata; non l'analizzo, non la commento; e mentirei se ti dicessi di esser proprio sicuro che in quel momento non fossimo, anche noi, sovraeccitati in sommo grado e mezzi colpiti di allucinazione..." (Capuana 1884, 120). 41 It is, therefore, by ultimately walking the line between scientific essay and 'autofiction' that Spiritismo? negotiates 'the (meta)fictional' into the space of the non-fictional. This experiment both precedes and is conducive to the self-reflexivity of Ricordi di infanzia e di giovinezza ([1893] 2005), 42 the only text by Capuana that has explicitly autobiographical ambitions.
In Spiritismo? he mainly uses divulgative non-fiction to underpin metareference. It is along the same lines that the first chapter of the little-known Ricordi, where self-reflexivity liaises more heavily with the genre of (quasi) autobiographical writing, should be analysed. While the whole of Ricordi is useful and informative, especially in regard to the depiction of Capuana's precocious pro-Risorgimento convictions, it is in the opening chapter (1839-1845) that Capuana describes his infantile, recurring vision/dream of a woman entering his room and embracing him. In this story, a very young Capuana first encounters a 'fictional' character and the product of his imagination, who takes the shape of a flesh-and-blood 'visitation' (Davies 1979, 100): Ricordo [...] un fenomeno, notevolissimo di cui serbo netta memoria, come se si trattasse di caso recente; avevo tre o quattro anni. In quella camera, su quel lettino, ho fatto, notte per notte, lo stessissimo sogno. Oggi che fin la scienza comincia ad occuparsi di visioni, di apparizioni forse non dovrei dire sogno, tanto più che anche allora lo credevo proprio una realtà. Non ne ebbi mai pau-41 This kind of occasional bracketing of the certainty of truth does not seem to be, after all, too far from what 'canonical' authors of contemporary Italian autofiction produce. See for example Giulio Mozzi: "Anche questo ricordo è inventato, e io sono costretto a chiedermi che cosa sto facendo. Sto raccontando cose vere e false insieme, sto fantasticando cose che non sono accadute e forse sto cercando di convincermi che sarebbero potute accadere, e che ciò che allora desideravo accadesse erano appunto queste cose. E allora non so se ciò che sto raccontando è solo ciò che mi è accaduto […], nel qual caso dovrei fare qualche tentativo per limitare l'invenzione, per costringermi a raccontare esattamente ciò che è stato, oppure se ciò che sto raccontando è una mia fantasia che riusa senza scrupoli ricordi veri e ricordi falsi, invenzioni vecchie e invenzioni che mi vengono in mente nel momento stesso in cui scrivo" (1998,125).
While this already tenuous autofictional impulse in Capuana's work appears to fade after Ricordi, what peaks in the Nineties is fe-male character-centred self-reflexivity. The motif of the female visitation and/or of the woman semiotised into a self-reflexive device, in fact, can be traced, in the most sophisticated way, in La Sfinge (1895-1897).

La Sfinge-Fulvia and the Historical Progression of Art
As I have pointed out more comprehensively elsewhere (Zuccala 2019a), La Sfinge represents the most complex theorising effort carried out by Capuana in a single self-reflexive narrative piece. Here, Capuana's narrativisation and comments on his artistic theories reach maturity. The many, partly undeveloped, female characterisation-centred self-reflexive threads that have intermittently come to the fore in previous works are here recomposed in a vastly superior narrativisation, one that by its very existence counters some critics' claims of theoretical approximation 44 on Capuana's part, particularly in his 'post-verista' phase. As in some of his earlier stories, La Sfinge's plot revolves around the story of a Roman playwright, Giorgio Montani, who, in a fit of inspirational crisis, contemplates exploiting his own love affair with the seemingly candid widow Fulvia, as a source of narrative material. Fulvia, however, turns out to be more and more mysterious and contradictory (i.e. Capuana 1897b, 43, 46, 66), to the point where Giorgio is prompted to identify her by association with a symbolist painting of the Sophoclean Sphinx that dominates the wall in his study: 45 "La Sfinge mitologica; sei tu, siete tutte, è la donna, l'enimma insolubile!" (Capuana 1897b, 95), screams Montani, 46 before killing himself with a shot-gun. After decades of being utterly disregarded, the obvious, and yet not unproblematic, meta-artistic theme was tackled for the first time by Annamaria Pagliaro. 47 For Pagliaro, the novel's self-reflexive elements are to be found mainly in Giorgio's (meta) literary comments, which are mostly directed to his only interlocutor in the story, his lover Fulvia. Given the prominence of such comments in the narrative, and the correspondence one finds between them and Capuana's critical pieces, it seems to Pagliaro that in La Sfinge, Cap-44 See at least Azzolini 1988.
45 For Barnaby (2004, 19) it is a metareference to Le Sphinx Vainqueur by Moreau (1886). The pattern of female characterisation that emerges from the story is that, put in Rimmon-Kenan's terms (2002), of an increasing or developing 'complexity'. For a more complete synopsis of the novel, see Zuccala 2019a.

• Gender and Self-Reflections Beyond the caso patologico
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 75 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, uana "fa[ccia] del suo protagonista il portavoce della propria ideologia artistica" (1989,67). However, the realistic plot, the many and excessively overt metanarrative comments and equally excessive symbolism, render La Sfinge a less than satisfactory work, from many points of view, realistic, symbolist, and self-reflexive: Nella Sfinge il lettore invece di trovarsi partecipante, di fronte a un brano di vita, si trova a cercare di mettere insieme un puzzle che dovrebbe corrispondere alle macchinazioni della mente alterata del protagonista. (Pagliaro 1989, 70) Such "uso di simboli un po' forzato" (69), 48 revolving around the image of the Sphinx, inharmoniously combined with Giorgio's too explicit artistic reflections, mars both the reader's possibility of aesthetic immersion and that of appreciating the novel metanarratively. In Pagliaro's view: Sia il dramma del protagonista, sia l'ambiente sono così artefatti che riesce impossibile al lettore sentirsi di fronte ad una rappresentazione di vita immediata o ricostruirsi nella mente il procedimento della creazione artistica. (1989,69) In the case of La Sfinge, any analysis intending to shed new light on this dimension of the novel cannot dwell on an all-too-obvious metanarrative layer, but, rather, ought to examine how the numerous, openly self-reflexive comments, combined with the intricate symbolism of the Sphinx in the Oedipus myth, allow for the exegetic path opened by Pagliaro (1989;and enlarged by Barnaby 2004), to be expanded. This, in turn, leads to reconsidering La Sfinge as a substantial piece of self-reflexive writing, one that at once narrativises and puts into practice crucial theoretical principles, as they were being articulated by Capuana in his critical pieces with increased clarity, and as we have seen them self-reflexively emerge, more or less convincingly, in the works analysed earlier. 49 In the light of all that has been discussed above, it is possible at this point to understand how Capuana's theory -one that unfolds with increasing complexity decade after decade -can be understood in relation to two core, intertwined principles, the first of which is the principle "delle forme artistiche e del loro svolgimento nella sto-

• Gender and Self-Reflections Beyond the caso patologico
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 76 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, ria" (Sportelli 1950, 39). 50 Capuana conceives Art as one unified and evolving macro-organism of the literary genres, that is, Art itself as a historically progressive form. For Capuana, genres are like biological organisms, which are born, grow and decay.
Le forme artistiche sono quasi identiche alle forme naturali, e non capricciose, accidentali; ma svolgonsi con un logico processo, arrivano alla loro perfetta applicazione, decadono e muoiono. (1950,39) La storia d'un'opera d'arte va calcolata preciso come la storia d'un organismo. Il dramma degli indiani, la tragedia dei Greci e i lavori di Shakespeare non sono da reputarsi una cosa affatto diversa. (Capuana 1872, XVII) This organic progression of art leads artists to abandon 'exhausted' forms spontaneously in favour of newborn ones. More specifically, in Capuana's times, this principle is what had led to -see the hints in "Il piccolo archivio" -the exhaustion of theatrical art (especially drama, which was most appreciated during the Risorgimento in that it was infused with historical patriotism) -and to the increasing prominence of the "incipiente forma del romanzo moderno". 51 Each stage of this evolution represents a natural stage of the pseudo-Darwinian artistic progression from 'sentiment' to 'reflection'. 52 If reflection played a bigger role in contemporary naturalist (and post-naturalist) literature than it had done previously, that did not imply that the imaginative function was dead and art had become a fully speculative endeavour, but rather, that the proportion of imagination and fantasy and reflection had shifted.
53 The durability of this principle is well illustrated by Anna Storti Abate (1993,35) and also emerges from Giorgio Luti's overview of the collection Gli 'ismi ' (1973, XV-XXI).

• Gender and Self-Reflections Beyond the caso patologico
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 77 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, thetics (1831), uses the Sphinx as a "symbol of symbolism itself" (Hegel 1975a, 360), of the progression of the human Spirit in history and the progression of genres in the history of art: from the 'primitive' epic of Homer to the speculative thought of nineteenth-century philosophy, through commedia dell'arte and Shakespearean tragedy. For Hegel, this symbolism is intrinsic to the hybrid form of the Sphinx (see also Regier Goth 2005, 120), with the human head (i.e. human reasoning) emerging from the primitive and twofold animality of the eagle's wings and the lion's body.
Out of the dull strength and power of the animal the human spirit tries to push itself forward, without coming to a perfect portrayal of its own freedom and animated shape, because it must still remain confused and associated with what is other than itself (Hegel 1975a, 361) Capuana absorbs the Hegelian theory of the historical progression of the arts, not only from De Sanctis' Saggi critici (1866) and Camillo De Meis' Dopo la laurea (1868,126,180), but also by reading Hegel directly (see Patruno 1980Patruno , 1996Pupino 2004, 23-39;Balloni 2007, 139); 54 it, therefore, does not come as a surprise that, much like Hegel in the Aesthetics, Capuana decides to pick precisely the image of the Sphinx to symbolise that progression in the novel. The human (feminine) head progressively emerging from the animal body perfectly signifies the struggle of a superior, more 'reflexive' 55 art form -the modern novel initiated by Zola and, before him, Balzac -to overpower the 'animality' of prior, more 'primitive'/sensuous/imaginative modes of artistic expression. Furthermore, as Regier Goth remarks, the Greek Sphinx -like her sister, 56 the Chimera -has in fact a "tripartite anatom[y]" (2005,79): she is partly human and partly bestial, with her bestial part in turn subdivided into two, between lion and raptor. Inconsequential though this nuance may appear, this 'disunity' even within the unity of the animal part appears signifi- 54 Patruno (1996) and Pupino (2004, 23-39) both examine in further detail the way in which Capuana's theory merges the Darwinian struggle for life with the Hegelian evolution towards speculative prose. 55 See Spiritismo?: "la riflessione entr[a] oggi nell'opera di arte in maggior quantità che non pel passato" (1884, 216); and Per l'arte: "Questa benedetta o maledetta riflessione moderna, questa smania di positivismo di studi, di osservazioni, di collezione di fatti, noi non possiamo cavarcela di dosso. È il nostro sangue, è il nostro spirito; chi non la prova può dirsi un uomo di parecchi secoli addietro smarritosi per caso in mezzo a noi. Ed è naturale quindi che dal nostro sangue e dal nostro spirito la riflessione positiva passi a rivelarsi anche nell'opera d 'arte" (1994, 43). 56 Pasquini gives a minimalist account of the relationship between the Sphinx and the Chimera: "il mostro chimerico è generato, come la Sfinge, dai rapporti incestuosi della comune madre Echidna, quindi partecipa appieno del suo mistero enigmatico" (Pasquini 2012, 19).

• Gender and Self-Reflections Beyond the caso patologico
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 78 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, cant when associating the anatomy of the Sphinx with the 'anatomy' of the modern artwork as it emerges from both the novel, La Sfinge, and Capuana's critical works. In Capuana's essays, an artwork is the combination not of two, but of three components: riflessione, fantasia and immaginazione. "Fantasia" and "Immaginazione", as Enrica Rossetti shows (1974,, are often used in combination in Capuana's essays (for instance Per l'arte 1994, 40-2), appearing as the twofold opposites of riflessione: "l'immaginazione è una delle forme nella quale [sic] si esprime il pensiero; la riflessione ne è un altra" (1974, 106). Capuana's essays show the reader that fantasia and immaginazione are really two facets of the same non-reflexive pole: "per rappresentare [un soggetto] [...] ci vogliono sempre quelle due divine facoltà: la fantasia, l'immaginazione, che potrebbe anche darsi siano un'identica cosa" (1994,45). The duality of the concept of immaginazione, then, seems to be captured well by the duality of the Sphinx's animal body.

• Gender and Self-Reflections Beyond the caso patologico
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 79 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, Indeed, it is due to such an inherent exhaustion of theatre as an art form that the creative efforts of the protagonist are inevitably doomed to fail. What may look simply like the evidence of a pessimistic stance is in fact the affirmation of the historically determined superiority of a genre. Giorgio personifies the inherent exhaustion of theatre as an art form, as postulated by Capuana's critical pages. Theatrical works as such are seen as intrinsically incapable of capturing the vitality of reality in its outmoded and insufficient forms. This is the reason why, in the story of La Sfinge, the composition of the Arianna play is not completed and, instead, procrastination is endless. In contrast, the novel La Sfinge is successfully completed and published. The failure of Giorgio as a playwright is not, in this instance, the failure of Capuana the novelist.
The choice of the Sphinx as a central symbol in the long racconto, therefore, is more than a naive homage to a fashionable symbolist trend. It is, in embryo, the fundamental principle of the biological-idealistic evolution of literary genres, one that, as has been shown, previous short stories had only been able to touch upon metanarratively.
The presence of one particular intertextual reference further reinforces this thesis, a "mezzo verso dello Shakespeare" from Act Five of Othello: "Eccolo! Io son colui Che Otello fu!" (53) [That's he that was Othello: here I am] 59 (Shakespeare 2005, 205). Here Giorgio is talking about himself as a disappointed suitor and refers to himself as a 'new' Othello. In a self-reflexive light, Giorgio comparing himself to a Shakespearean character makes Capuana's theoretical point: Giorgio, one of Capuana's best-crafted fictional characters, represents the natural evolution postulated by Capuana's own evolutionary theory of genres, according to which Shakespeare's dramatic characters (e.g. Othello) become living characters of fiction. Immodest though this claim may sound on the part of both Giorgio and Capuana, it is nonetheless perfectly aligned to Capuana's theory.
In La Sfinge, the other crucial aspect of Capuana's theory, the 'microtheory' of the individual act of artistic creation (on which previous works also focus in a self-reflexive manner, but without an adequate content basis), is effectively narrativised. In all the works discussed above, the self-reflexive focus is almost exclusively on the eroticised struggle, on the artist's part, to merge forma and contenuto: on 'desire', as contemporary critical theory would put it, as a basis for narrative. Overviewing the scholarly corpus, from Barthes to Cavarero, it is noticeable how crucial the image and the story of the Sphinx are. In particular, De Lauretis and Cavarero seem to focus most thoroughly on the unfolding of the encounter between Oedipus and the Sphinx. 59 Barnaby regards the quotation as a "self-aggrandising Shakespearean imagery" combined to "Hackneyed decadent rhetoric" (2004,21).

• Gender and Self-Reflections Beyond the caso patologico
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 80 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, By doing so, De Lauretis' erudite discussion reaches the conclusion that what underlies Western narratives of all times is the universal (masculine) desire of the (male) hero -the mythical (male) subject -to gain knowledge (and therefore power) through penetrating, trespassing into the (feminine) regions of the mysterious, the unknown and the forbidden. The myth of a male Oedipus defying and defeating the female Sphinx so that he can reach the object of his desire is thus paradigmatic of the key role played by desire in any narrative (De Lauretis 1987, 104-5). Cavarero's reading, too, points out that the knowledge Oedipus craves is itself the knowledge of a narrative -his own story -and that both the Sphinx who speaks in riddles, symbolising the obstacles to the hero's desire, and the (incestuous) object of that desire, Queen Giocasta, are feminine. Thus, narrative generates and is generated by desire, and vice versa (1997,(15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26). It is all the more plausible, then, to expect La Sfinge to provide some sort of selfreflexive hint in this direction, as well as for the symbolic power of La Sfinge to unfold through the story of Giorgio and Fulvia, particularly one framed explicitly as Giorgio's attempt to penetrate Fulvia's riddle.
When approaching Capuana's conceptualisation of the creative process in his critical work, it becomes obvious that his critical pages explain its phenomenology not only as a heterosexual struggle/intercourse, but also as a sort of "allucinazione artistica" (1884, 356), and that they do so by drawing -in the manner of Spiritismo? -a scientific parallel between artistic inspiration and somnambulist and hypnotic states. 60 Following Richet's studies on the human psyche in L'homme et l'intelligence (1884) and Taine's De l'intelligence (1871), Capuana describes the artistic spark as a "sdoppiamento di coscienza" (Giannetti-Karsienti 1996, 277), in which the artist experiences a state of intermittent lucidity, consisting of a series of very brief "amnesie dell'io cosciente". 61 These intermittenze take place in a semiconscious state, very similar to that of the medium in the experiments of somnambulisme provoqué, as described in Spiritismo? and metanarratively touched upon in some of the works hitherto examined. While in this state, the artist's mind transforms the "fantasmi" floating in the recesses of its memory in "figure" (279); when emerging from this condition, the artist tries to fix, to imprison these 'figures' in artistic form. Owing to its semi-conscious nature, the very core of the creative process remains for Capuana "forse per sempre un fenomeno inesplicabile nella sua essenza" (269), not only to those who study it but also to the artist himself: "C'è sempre un punto, nell'atto della produzione, in cui la facoltà artistica agisce con 60 On this parallel in both Capuana and Verga see also Mangini 2007. 61 Giannetti-Karsienti 1996, 269, 278. See also Cigliana 1995Foni 2007; Michelacci 2015.
In examining the love-story between Giorgio and Fulvia, one finds that it is indeed characterised by such "intermittenze" of consciousness, as Giorgio's jealousy obscures, at times, his lucidity. But it is again an intertextual reference, at the very beginning of the story, that enables the reader to connect the description of the creative process in Capuana's critical pages more compellingly with its (meta)narrative rendition in La Sfinge. The key element here is not a quote, but rather a place, the Pincian Hill in Rome, where Giorgio had first seen Fulvia. This intertextual element points directly towards Capuana's writings: the pages recalling how the inspiration to draft the first version of Giacinta came to him: Fu certamente in una dolce serata di ottobre del 1875, lungo un viale del Pincio, che la irresistibile tentazione mi si presentò tutt'a un tratto alla mente […] così m'apparve all'immaginazione per la prima volta Giacinta, seducente visione, a traverso la calda parola di un senatore del regno. (Capuana 1972, 32) 62 By beginning with this intertextual element, the narration links the tormented liaison between Giorgio and Fulvia/La Sfinge to the turbulent 'love story' between the writer and his beloved character, Giacinta. The more the affair unfolds in the novel, the more the impression is reinforced that it must carry a metanarrative meaning related to the fictional process of sign-production, owing to the progressive semiotisation of Fulvia. In Giorgio's eyes, she progressively turns from a flesh and blood woman into, literally, a written 'sign' and a writing tool. She loses her surname first: "Fulvia Fiorelli-Crispi era divenuta soltanto Fulvia per lui" (1897b, 39). Then her forehead turns into a page to be read: La guardava con occhi dilatati, frugandola con lo sguardo. Era dunque proprio innocente o affatto impenetrabile colei? Non leggeva niente di quel che si attendeva di leggere in quella fronte ombrata da riccioli [...] Ah, potessi leggere qui dentro! Le picchiava delicatamente con le dita d'una mano su la fronte, spalancandole in faccia gli occhi ansiosi. (Capuana 1897b, 95) On Fulvia's 'page' a question mark is 'carved': "due fossettine, rileva[vano] leggermente le gote sotto quelle caratteristiche pinne nasali, simili a un punto interrogativo tracciato orizzontalmente" (64). When Giorgio discovers that her page has been written on by Zuccala
However, it is not even the semiotisation itself that matters the most, but the fact that it is Fulvia who spontaneously lends herself to such a gender-based instrumental function: "Per un uomo come te, la donna non può, non dev'essere uno scopo, ma un mezzo" (Capuana 1897b, 100). This act of self-surrender and self-objectification echoes Capuana's theory once again: a female character who portrays herself as a medium is immediately reminiscent of the instrumentalisation of a woman for literary purposes, as described in Spiritismo?'s experiments, where Capuana "aveva voluto mettersi in contatto, tramite la sua sonnambula, con lo spirito di Ugo Foscolo, per chiarire alcuni episodi di una biografia che aveva in mente di scrivere" (Cigliana 1995, 30). Such a consonance with both Capuana's essays and his previous short stories is further corroborated by the fact that in the novel, in order to activate Fulvia's inspirational power, Giorgio repeatedly asks her to visit his studio: Vieni a farmi una visita, vieni a lasciarmi nello studio, assieme col profumo del corpo, il tuo lieto fantasma in tutti gli angoli, su le poltrone, su le seggiole. Vieni a toccare, a rovistare i fogli dell'Arianna. (Capuana 1897b, 87) The sketch of the Sphinx -as Barnaby points out -is already in Giorgio's room when he first meets Fulvia, but, crucially, it is unfinished, as often occurs in Capuana's work: "figure appena delineate, [...] contorni indecisi, [...] segni tracciati con mano febbrile e che in qualche punto bisognava interpretare per intenderli" (Capuana 1897b, 21-2). As a result of Fulvia's "visitations" (Davies 1979, 101), in his moments of lucidity Giorgio stares at the piece of art 63 -"S'era distratto un istante, stupito della vivissima e nuova impressione che gli veniva da quelle note figure" (Capuana 1897b, 44). In those interludes of consciousness, he works creatively on those hallucinatory images: "gli era parso che la impassibile e bellissima faccia della Sfinge si fosse animata e negli occhi e sulle labbra le fosse balenato un sorriso, oh! Il sorriso di Fulvia" (48).
The device of the unfinished painting of the Sphinx that comes to life perfectly objectifies the phases of Giorgio's creative process: after he has reworked his memorial impressions of the observed object (Fulvia), he vivifies the sketched artwork while semi-conscious.

• Gender and Self-Reflections Beyond the caso patologico
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 83 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, This rather unoriginal 64 narrative device, however, does more than simply echo Wilde's and Poe's theme of the tableau vivant. The way in which Giorgio's mind (almost) vivifies the artwork also fictionalises the future trajectory of art that Capuana envisions in Cronache. In Cronache he foresees, following Hegel and De Meis, a time when pure thought will translate into art without the need of a material medium: Immagina dunque cosa potrà essere l'opera d'arte quando il pensiero non incontrerà più ostacoli nel marmo, nella tela, nei colori, nei suoni, nella parola, quando l'opera d'arte si formerà, si esplicherà con la stessa rapidità e la stessa nettezza dell'idea […] cioè quando il pensiero diventerà visibile, tangibile. (1899,(29)(30)(31) Thus, in La Sfinge, Capuana's framing theory of genres and 'internal' phenomenology of fiction-making masterfully intertwine, and eventually coalesce. The "fantasma artistico individuale" intermittently haunting Giorgio's mind and triggering the artistic creation effectively fictionalises Capuana's theorisation of the creative process. In the Hegelian 'life-like' evolutionary scheme, however, art is not yet at that point, either in the historical present in which Capuana lives, or in the fin-de-siècle narrative present which Giorgio Montani inhabits. The literary work in the age of symbolism and of Decadentism still needs a physical support, however imperfect and finite. For this reason Giorgio Montani's completion and vivification of the painting just by sheer power of thought are realised and performed only at the level of somnambulist hallucination, and neither the sketch of the Sphinx in his studio nor the new theatrical piece he is working on, Arianna, ever reaches completion. What is written and published quickly is the novel La Sfinge itself, which best represents -with its high metareferential coefficient -this tectonic shift of art as a whole, towards philosophical and aesthetic (self)reflection revitalised by form. Discovering that there is in fact -in Capuana -another and 'countercanonical' 1 line of female characterisation that can be understood as 'peaking' with La Sfinge prompts the question of whether the various self-reflexive triggers that female characters set off in many of Capuana's short stories and novels occur in a vacuum within the broader context of Capuana's corpus, or whether they might reflect a wider, substantial trend. Moving along these contextual lines of enquiry, it becomes apparent that often what appears to be just a single, isolated, gendered iteration of a self-reflexive impulse is, in fact, figuratively at the epicentre of what can be understood -to borrow a famous image from Bachelard's The Poetics of Space ([1964] 1994) -as a self-reflexive intertextual "reverberation". Such a 'spatial' effect expands into the editorial vessel -often a collection of previously published short stories -in which the single short story is contained or embedded, and dominates it so as to awaken its 'dormant' self-reflexive potential. On this basis, this second section will move from the consideration of the single short story as an isolated phenomenon and 1 I mean it not in the sense of replacing 'canonical' reading, but in the sense of an exegetic line that might dialogue with and complement more canonical ones. See at least Ciugureanu 2011. Within the scholarly context of postcolonial Italy, see Venturini's 2010 elaboration of this notion.

• Metareference in l'altro and l'ultimo Capuana
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 86 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, will explore precisely what surrounds these gendered self-reflections at the level of entire collections or otherwise 'homogeneous' clusters of Capuana's writing. This operation of (partial) distancing from the specificity of a particular short story may lead to a reassessment of a collection, of Capuana's work in a particular genre or even of an entire chronological portion of his production.
4.1 Self-Reflexive Collections: "Un caso di sonnambulismo" (1874) and Storia fosca Taking a comprehensive, diachronical, combined overview of both Capuana's career and capuanistica, an element that clearly emerges is the coexistence, from the very outset, of Capuana the theorist and Capuana narratore. 2 It is, therefore, not surprising that, from the very beginning of his career, the paths of reflection on art on the one hand and of creative writing on the other are closely intertwined and influence each other -no matter how inadvertently -to the point where their ongoing mutual interference generates a self-reflexive intersection, a (meta)narrative Spannung, even, a plateau in the Deleuzian-Guattarian sense of "a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities" (Deleuze, Guattari 1987, 2): a multifaceted layer of reading, reasoning and decoding through which Capuana's oeuvre can be accessed from virtually any angle and to which one is led, regardless of one's entry point into Capuana's corpus. Such an intersection -variously negotiated, unevenly distributed chronologically and often, but not exclusively, catalysed by female characterisation -seems to run transversally through his whole career, from the exordium to the collections still prolifically produced by "l'ultimo Capuana" (Palermo 1990).
On examination of what 'surrounds' the female characterisationcentred short stories "L'ideale di Piula" and "Contrasto", included in the early collection Storia fosca (1883), it can be seen that in neither the opening piece, "Storia fosca" (Capuana 1974a, 173-85), nor in the following short story, "Un bacio" (Capuana 1974a, 186-91), is there a detectable self-reflexive component. However, in the short story that follows "L'ideale di Piula", titled "Un caso di sonnambulismo" (Capuana 1974a, 209-30), the self-reflexivity of the collection manifests itself at its fullest. This point is illustrated very effectively by Comoy Fusaro (2009) in her most recent and innovative analysis of the short story and, thus, my own analysis does not require a radical rethinking but only a commentary aimed not at confirming 2 Capuana began to write for La Nazione in '64 and started off as a narrator with "Il dottor Cymbalus" in '65.
Then, overwhelmed by the inexplicability of the event, he loses his mind and, thus, becomes the subject of the Foucauldian "clinical gaze" 4 of the psychiatrist Dottor Croissart, who also writes a clinical report. It is, therefore, a text that is "apparentemente poliziesco e scientifico" (Comoy Fusaro 2009, 131), but one that has actually a very marked self-reflexive component, if analysed in depth. On the surface, it takes the 'impersonal' form of a scientific document -a medical report by the court medical expert -that the young naturalista narrator/author (Capuana) is ostensibly reporting verbatim, with no interpolation: Fra i tanti casi di sonnambulismo dei quali la scienza medica ha fatto tesoro, questo del signor Dionigi Van-Spengel è certamente uno dei più meravigliosi e dei più rari. Compendierò l'interessante memoria pubblicata recentemente dal dottor Croissart; spesso per far meglio, adoprerò le stesse parole dell'illustre scrittore. (Capuana 1974a, 209) The tone of the extradiegetic narration endeavours to adhere to this allegedly objective report, with an austere, factual description of the subject. By juxtaposing the two passages where the homicide is described in Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1900) and Capuana respectively, Melani shows how the evidences are, a posteriori, unmistakable. Yet, the consonances stop there because of the divergences in the way the mystery is solved: Mentre nel racconto di Poe l'orribile delitto viene risolto grazie all'abilità analitica di Monsieur Dupin [...] nel [caso] di Capuana il direttore in capo della polizia, il signor Van-Spengel, risolve il caso grazie alla propria veggenza durante un periodo di sonnambulismo. (2006, 58) 5

• Metareference in l'altro and l'ultimo Capuana
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 88 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, There is also no textual or paratextual element to alert the reader to the intertextual presence of Poe -neither prefazione nor dedica, for example -and the self-consciousness of the text is to be found only in other textual markers. It ought to be pointed out that here the mimetic illusion is one that rests not on the absence of framing devices, but rather on the very credibility of the authenticating apparatus: the Sartrean narrative pact that triggers immersion here is based on the notion that the reader is, in fact, reading a narrative, and that narrative is a faithful rendition of what has happened in the 'real world'. Yet, to begin with, those very authenticating remarks/ notes that are supposed to corroborate the authenticity of the story are so numerous 6 that the reader starts doubting them due to their very intrusiveness. Furthermore, some of these notes are easily identifiable as fictional (Madrignani 1970, 85;Comoy Fusaro 2009, 112). 7 In addition, the entanglement of no fewer than five narrative voices -the 'impersonal' narrator, 8 the intruding-omniscent narrator, the doctor, the detective, the victim, plus at least two identifiable court witnesses (Comoy Fusaro 2009, 113-4

) -alongside "indiz[i] rilasciat[i]
al lettore" (120), such as the occasional narratorial intrusion of the compilatore, leads the reader progressively to question the 'scientific' credibility of the documentation on the basis of which the realism of the case should stand. Indeed, the reader's attention is drawn towards realising the fictional nature not just of the psychiatrist's report but virtually all presented 'documents' -from the detective's somnambulist report, to the reconstruction of the trial, to the court expert's report -and, as a consequence, ultimately, to focus on -with Wolf -"the opacity of discourse" (Wolf 1990, 285): 9 the very ambiguity between what is presented as reality and what is presented as narration of a true story. It is pivotal to remind ourselves that, as Comoy Fusaro points out, Capuana harshly rejected this short story of his (even though both Treves and Verga thoroughly liked it), 10 not only owing to the breaches of the notion of impersonalità created by narratorial intrusions, but also precisely because it had failed to reproduce a reliable authenticating apparatus, and therefore, for having 6 For example, there is an extended bibliographical note to the work of Dr Croissart, that reveals it to be entirely untrue/fictional. 7 But other critics did not pick up on such a fictionality, see Farnetti 1992. 8 The impersonal narrator's voice orchestrates the shift in focalisation with registalike statements such as "Lascio la parola al signor Croissart" (220).
9 "The opacity of discourse disturbs illusion not by undermining the story from within, but rather from without, by detracting the reader's attention from the fictional world and focusing it on its making" (Wolf 1990, 285).
This rejection suggests that, at this early stage, self-reflexive writing -even though already pioneeringly attempted by Capuana -is still seen, in Capuana's critical reflections, as a 'lesser', insufficient form when compared to the naturalist target. On the one hand, what appears as a 'counter-discursive' stance 11 does not detract from the presence of a significant cluster of self-reflexivity in the story and in the overall collection. On the other hand, notwithstanding this initial rejection, decade after decade, the self-reflexive turn in Capuana's oeuvre will become increasingly prominent, more deliberate, and fully embraced by the author not only in his creative, but also in his critical work.
4.2 Self-Reflexivity and Genre: Il racconta-fiabe  In light of the breadth and diversity of Capuana's corpus, contextualising seemingly isolated instances of gendered self-reflection results in following not only collection-bound lines but also genre-bound pathways, as happens when attempting to approach his fairy tales from the angle of self-reflexivity. As is known, Capuana thought very highly of his fiabe, to the point of writing, in a rather famous letter to Corrado Guzzanti: "Fairy tales will probably be the work through which my name will live on" (see Miele 2009b, 247). 12 In 1882 Capuana published the first of his collections of fairy tales, the popular anthology C'era una volta. 13 The collection is prefaced by an authorial intervention where the (implied) author reminisces about the compositional process: "In quel tempo ero triste ed anche un po' ammalato, con un'inerzia intellettuale che mi faceva rabbia, e i lettori non immagineranno facilmente la gioia da me provata nel vedermi, a un tratto, fiorire nella fantasia quel mondo meraviglioso". 14 11 I use counterdiscourse as Terdiman does (1985, 13), building on Foucault (Foucault, Deleuze 1977, 209).
13 This first collection is preceded by the single short story La Reginotta (Sardo 2015, 5-13), which, as Sardo explains, was composed independently of and prior to the collection (1881).
14 The way in which the author describes the creative moment in this prefazione reflects the ever present theme of visitations in the female character-centred short stories examined above: "Vissi più settimane soltanto con essi, ingenuamente, come non credevo potesse mai accadere a chi è già convinto che la realtà sia il vero regno dell'arte. Se un importuno fosse allora venuto a parlarmi di cose serie e gravi, gli avrei risposto, senza dubbio, che avevo ben altre e più serie faccende pel capo; avevo Serpentina

• Metareference in l'altro and l'ultimo Capuana
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 90 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, The presence of a prefazione as an attempt to influence reader response before crossing the threshold to the fictional storyworld is not surprising. More noticeably, alongside a "mondo meraviglioso di fate, di maghi, di re, di regine, di orchi, di incantesimi" (Capuana 2015, 70), Capuana includes an overtly self-reflexive tale with the intrinsically self-conscious title of "Il racconta-fiabe" (113-17), as the last short story of that collection.
The story concerns "un povero diavolo, che aveva fatto tutti i mestieri e non era riuscito in nessuno" (113). Following his many professional failures, "un giorno gli venne l'idea di andare attorno, a raccontare fiabe ai bambini" (113), and the povero diavolo ventures into a new and exciting profession, that of 'children's storyteller'. Yet, after unsuccessfully trying to narrate a few widely known stories -"Bella addormentata nel Bosco", "Cappuccetto Rosso", "Cenerentola" -he finds himself hopelessly lost in a Dantesque dark forest. Here le fate suggest he consult the wizard "Mago Tre-Pi" -whom critics have identified as the fictionalised alter ego of prominent Italian ethnographer (see Pitré 1888Pitré , 1965Pitré , 1968) and personal friend, Giuseppe Pitré (Miele 2009b, 248), 15 whose works were familiar to Capuana. The wizard suggests that he should approach "fata Fantasia" (116) for help and inspiration. Fantasia gives the storyteller a number of common items -"una stiacciata, un'arancia d'oro, un ranocchino, una serpicina, un uovo nero, tre anelli, insomma tante cose strane" (Capuana 2015, 116). Supported by these props, the struggling storyteller suddenly finds himself capable of producing the very stories that are contained in the collection itself and which a(n ideal) chronological reader would have just finished reading before reaching the last fiaba: "Spera di sole, Ranocchino, Cecina, Il cavallo di bronzo, Serpentina, Testa-di-rospo" (117).
In an instance of the transtextual (and transmedial) characterisation (Richardson 2010) that has gradually emerged as a prominent feature of Capuana's writing since Profili, the character of the storyteller becomes both a leitmotif of Capuana's fairy tale narrative and the signpost for a lurking, and occasionally surfacing, self-reflexivity. 16 So much so that, for Jack Zipes (2009), following the transtextual advenin pericolo, o la Reginotta che mi moriva di languore per Ranocchino o il Re che faceva la terza prova di star sette anni alla pioggia e al sole per guadagnarsi la mano di un'adorata fanciulla" (Capuana 2015, 17).
15 For Zipes, "In some ways, just as the character of the wizard Tre-Pi is an allusion to Giuseppe Pitré, the great Sicilian folklorist and Capuana's friend, the storyteller himself is somewhat of a self-portrait" (2009,368).
Here the narrator-Capuana might be referring to the decade-long interval between the first (1882) and the second collection (1893), which is nonetheless explicitly presented as a "continuazione di C'era una volta" (Capuana 2015, 119). The framing short story is titled "Prefazione" (121-2), and what distinguishes it from the introduction to the first collection is the fact that it is ideologically and stylistically aligned to the stories that follow, insofar as it is explicitly addressed to a youthful readership -to "le […] piccole menti" (Capuana 2015, 17-8) of his bambini lettori. Capuana's commitment to the principle that "la natural forma" be linked to each and every subject (Capuana 1899, 247-8) extends to metanarrative reflection and compels him to blend his 'digression' into the style of the rest of the collection. In this guise, Capuana's (implied) author bestows upon the narrator a privileged role 17 "To understand exactly how Capuana sought to 'renew' the fairytale genre in Italy, it is necessary to follow the amusing figure of the storyteller that he created while writing his first collection […]. By 1882, Capuana had tried his hand at many different kinds of writing -the short story, novel, poetry, essay, and drama -but he had not written fairy tales. In his tale 'The Storyteller', his comic invention of the man who had tried many trades and had not succeeded in any, is an ironic depiction of his own situation, even though he himself had been successful in other 'trades'" (Zipes 2009, 368).

• Metareference in l'altro and l'ultimo Capuana
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 93 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, flexive, doubly framed "Comare Formica" (3rd). Gina Miele mentions this as a case in point to prove how "the literary nature of Capuana's fiabe […] [is] apparent in the highly self-conscious narrative techniques present in certain tales". Miele continues: "While many plots respect […] the simple, linear style of oral folktales, […] 'Comare Formica' […] offers the significantly more complex structure of a 'tale within a tale'" (Miele 2009b, 251). "Comare Formica" is the story of a puzzling "povera donna", who seemingly "viveva del suo lavoro" as a seamstress. Not unlike La Sfinge, however, the story unfolds as one of increasing characterological complexity (Rimmon-Kenan 2002). "Con quella comare Formica non ci si capiva nulla" (Capuana 2015, 275): she is old-looking but energetic, poor but always happy, married but alone and relentlessly pursued by an ogre who wants to marry her, vulnerable but capable of defeating, through magic, a gang of thieves -hired by her envious "sei comari" neighbours, who "si struggevano di sapere chi fosse costei" (269) -, barely able to earn a living but capable of building a sumptuous palace for herself overnight. To thicken the "mistero" surrounding this puzzling character there is the fact that Comare Formica is herself a storyteller 18 who entertains the town's children with a multi-episodic story -"la mia fiaba non ha fine" (277) she explains -about a naughty "Reginotta", punished by being turned into a "vecchina". She is also persecuted by an ogre wanting to marry her, and nonna maga gives her a shiny palace as a gift. Then abruptly, amidst one of such storytelling sessions, "le vesti e la pelle di comare Formica si squarciarono e ne usciva fuori una bellissima giovinetta" (278). Yet, as Miele points out, at this point the lengthy story reaches a somewhat underwhelming conclusion: [La giovane] aveva nell'aspetto e nei modi tanta dolcezza, tanta bontà, tanta modestia, da allontanare ogni sospetto che la Reginotta vanitosa, superbiosa, disubbidiente, cattiva, gelosa, disperazione della nonna, fosse stata proprio lei, come aveva detto quella vecchia, e che il gastigo l'avesse cambiata. Era o non era dunque? La fiaba non lo chiarisce e si arresta qui.  Here the narrator -blurring the line between text and paratextual comments -addresses "his disappointed audience directly" (Miele 2009b, 251), 19 yet in a way that does nothing to clarify matters: 18 She is, in addition, a self-conscious storyteller commenting on her own craft: "Le fiabe son come sono e non si possono mutare" (278).
19 Miele then moves on to point out how this is "A feature derived from the oral tradition and quite common in Capuana's fairy tales" (2009b, 251).

• Metareference in l'altro and l'ultimo Capuana
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 94 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, Se poi volete saperne di più, mettetevi la via tra le gambe, andate nel paese dove comare Formica si fece fabbricare il bel palazzo di cui forse rimane qualche vestigio, se pure il vento, che allora apportò sassi, rena e calcina e acqua, non l'ha, dopo tanto tempo, spazzato via. Ma forse fareste inutilmente questo viaggio... E poi, bambini miei, non è bene essere eccessivamente curiosi. (Capuana 2015, 278-9) Another story that is written along similar lines of self-reflexive experimentalism is "Milda: Fiaba in un atto. Musica di Paul Allen", at the end of Si conta e si racconta (1911( -1913. This fiaba is conceived of as an atto unico, a theatrical as well as a musical piece. 20 Similarly, the collection Le ultime fiabe, published posthumously, contains the two fiabe "Fata Rosa-Bianca: Fiaba sceneggiata, atto unico" (2015, 21 and "Re Mangia Mangia", a "fiaba sceneggiata in due parti" (545-619), both also 'experimental' insofar as they are presented in the form of theatrical scripts. 22 In these three instances, as Sardo (2015) points out, fruition in a theatrical form emphasises mimesis and an immersion corroborated by images and soundscapes. However, reading the fiabe triggers the opposite effect, as the emphasis placed on the theatrical structure of the script functions as a constant reminder of the fictionality and the elaborate constructedness of these artistic artifacts.
Le ultime fiabe also contains "La fiaba del Re" (2015, 460-5), a story that both points towards its fictional nature in its title and contains a reference to an earlier 'autofictional' character designed by Capuana, the "Faccia Bella" of Ricordi di infanzia. In this short story, the king-protagonist is literally dying of boredom, and he seeks a 'quid' -"una cosa… che" (514) -capable of bestowing some sense of purpose to his undoubtedly privileged, but otherwise meaningless, existence. No-one can cheer him up, with the exception of "una vecchina" (515), an odd, eccentric creature who somehow manages to reach his bedside repeatedly: -Io ti ho voluto sempre bene! Ti ho visto nascere, ti ho visto crescere. Venivo a trovarti nei sogni. Ricordi? No? Mi chiamavi Faccia Bella. Ricordi? No? Scherzo. Penso che i bambini vedono tante cose nei sogni; e che forse potresti aver veduto anche 20 Sardo explains, in a philological guise, how "Milda" represents the arrival of a long journey that begins in 1883 with "Rospus".
21 The collection also contains two quadri.
22 See also Sardo (2015, XX-XXI). It is precisely because of their experimental and cross-generic nature that Sardo groups these three titles together at the end of her 2015 edition, in the "Fiabe musicali e teatrali" section. On the contrary, other editions, such as the 1993 Newton Compton, maintain the original partition.

• Metareference in l'altro and l'ultimo Capuana
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 95 The storytelling and entertaining prowess of the elderly woman, whose appearance changes even while she speaks -"come se […] gli si trasformasse davanti, ora bionda, ora bruna, ora giovanissima, esile, ora di forme piene, robuste; ora vestita di rosso, o di giallo, o di bianco, o di celeste, di stoffe tramate di oro" (516) -restores the inner giovinezza of the bored royal. Capuana's fiaba, then, becomes progressively, as Sardo describes it, a "territorio di sperimentazione narrativa" (Sardo 2015, XL), where traditional tropes and styles are reworked in a "parabola stilistica [and tematica]" (XL) of irony and antiheroism. In so doing, Capuana also progressively exposes his own strategies, yet in a way that is not easily compartmentalised or restricted to a specific collection. Across the Cinque volumi originari (Sardo 2015), self-consciousness repeatedly surfaces in a seemingly random fashion, although it may be postulated that this tendency becomes more marked towards the end of his career. What can also be noted is that the motif of female characterisation, as a catalyst for self-reflexivity, is strongly present in the genre, contributing to a strengthening of the hypothesis of a counter-canonical reading of il femminile, the compositional reverberation of which, nonetheless, extends beyond itself.

Self-Reflexive Periods: Le appassionate (1893),
Mondo occulto (1896) and Fausto Bragia (1897a) Starting with the notion of the gradability of self-reflexivity, as derived from Wolf, may lead us to reassess not only a single collection or a genre, but also an entire section or chronological portion of Capuana's oeuvre through the lens of narrative self-consciousness. The already mentioned short stories "Evoluzione" (1883-84), "Il piccolo archivio" (1886) and "Avventura" (1888), in which self-reflection and female characterisation are tightly intertwined, can be reconsidered within their editorial context, which goes beyond the female link, however pivotal that may be. This approach permits a quite radical reevaluation of the whole collection of Le appassionate ([1893] 1974a, 253-499). This is the collection that has been most unanimously regarded as revolving around the investigation of cases of pathological female psychophysiology. Suggesting a reevaluation through the lens of self-reflexivity is not to deny or underplay the obvious presence of such a dimension, but to stress the fact that it can be complemented by a different one. "Tortura" (1st, 1974a, 255-78) is, in fact, mainly devoted to the investigation of pathological inwardness, as are "Povero Dottore" (2nd, 1974a, 279-96), "Raffinatezza" (3rd, 1974a, 297-307), "Convalescenza" (4th, 1974a, and, towards the end of the collection, "Mostruosità" (375-88), "Adorata" (389-405), "Ribrezzo" (427-74) and "Anime in pena" (475-99). However, alongside these female-centred and 'naturalistic' short stories, "Un melodramma inedito" ([1888] 1974a, 317-23), the fifth story in the collection, explicitly thematises the artistic process, albeit that of musical composition rather than of the literary or visual arts addressed in so many of the works examined earlier. The protagonists of this dialogic story are the musician Merlini "wagnerista fanatico", and his musically illiterate friend Ludovico, whose name is itself allusively selfreflexive. The two are portrayed reminiscing about an extraordinary experience, which happened to Ludovico during a carriage ride, loudly echoing that in "Ebe". 23 The troubled inner state of the narrator, his "grave dolore" (318), the rapidly changing nocturnal views from the window, the broken, simple tune whistled by the coachman, are all conducive to a true allucinazione artistica: The sensation of experiencing musical creation is interspaced with (self)reflection on that very process, which is all the more surprising coming from Ludovico, someone who admits not knowing "una nota musicale": E durante il godimento dell'incredibile sensazione, riflettevo che dovrebbe [sic] accadere la stessa cosa nella mente d'un maestro quando comincia a svilupparvisi la creazione musicale.
[…] Quell'inattesa creazione m'assorbiva interamente; e l'essere attore cantante, orchestra e spettatore nello stesso punto, mi produceva qualcosa di così straordinario, di così ineffabile, che non avrei voluto, a ogni costo, sentirlo cessare. Che cantavano quelle voci diverse? Che rispondevano quegli istrumenti? L'impressione […] era stata confusa, indefinita. Le voci cantavano ma non pronunziavano parole: soprano, contralto, tenore, baritono, basso, cori, erano quasi varietà di strumenti; giacché c'erano pure i cori, mirabilmente fusi con le altre voci e con l'orchestra... Allucinazione assurda, ma evidente quanto la stessa realtà. (319; emphasis added) This reflection does not imply a wildly innovative meta-artistic approach; rather it offers yet another version of the theory of the creative spark as an intermittenza della coscienza, while the change of medium implicitly points to the fact that the substance of the creative process does not change across media. Therefore, if read alongside "Avventura" (with its suicide to achieve "l'ideale nel reale"), as well as "Il piccolo archivio" (with its narrative intertextual cataloguing of theatrical forms) and "Evoluzione" (with its transmodal staging of the divide between reality and fiction), the artistic hallucination of "Un melodramma" permits a better understanding of the metaliterary, compositional processes behind the "casi passionali" (Ghidetti, in Capuana 1974a, 253) and "lo scavo delle psicologie di donne offese nell'onore" (Ghidetti, in Capuana 1974a, 253) presented in the other short stories making up the collection. The collection cannot then be regarded as heavily self-reflexive in its entirety. Yet, the presence, within Le appassionate, of a significant number of works where the metaliterary theme figures prominently can be understood as functioning as a metanarrative commentary on... itself. For such a commentary to develop properly, the structure of the collection is not irrelevant, with the four highly self-reflexive pieces quite evenly interspersed amongst the remaining, predominantly non-self-reflexive nine pieces. 24 Likewise, a similar and context-sensitive analysis allows for a rereading of the individual female character-centred stories "Ofelia" (1893) and "Fausto Bragia" (1893) within the broader framework of the 24 The sequence is the following: 4 'non-self-reflexive' pieces; "Un melodramma inedito" and "Avventura"; 3 'non-self-reflexive' pieces; "Il piccolo archivio", 2 'non-selfreflexive' pieces; "Evoluzione"; then 2 'non-self-reflexive' pieces.

• Metareference in l'altro and l'ultimo Capuana
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 98 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, little-known volume titled Fausto Bragia e altri racconti, 25 published in 1897. This volume was disregarded by critics and even omitted, for no apparent reason, from the 1974 Edizione Ghidetti. Paul Barnaby has brought it back to the attention of scholars, partially due to its self-reflexive content, and the collection has recently been republished by Ilaria Muoio. On reading the two racconti in the broader context of the whole collection, we find that the same range of (meta)artistic themes, found in "Ofelia" and "Fausto Bragia", also informs, to various degrees, the greater part of the rest of the collection. Out of the twelve short stories, at least six -including the two already mentioned -explicitly discuss one aspect or another of the artistic process. "Zampone" (1897a, 117-34) tells the story of an aristocratic "artista moralista" (129), who writes historical novels with which he attempts to entertain guests in his salotto. While doing so, he progressively establishes a parallel between the fictionalised reality of the unfaithful protagonists of those novels and the painful, hidden reality of his wife's love affairs, in an attempt to cathartically sublimate his sorrow. The same happens in "Il primo maggio del dottor Piccottini" (135-43). The story is set in 1866 and unfolds as the narrative analysis of the relationship between the intellectual-narrator, who "[si] occupa di letteratura" (135), and his new acquaintance and neighbour, the austere and reserved man of science, Dottor Piccottini. The story addresses, in an explicitly self-reflexive way, the theme of the intricate relationships between science, rationality and emotion, with abundant nods to the neuroses and the historical decadence of turn-of-the-century Italy and Europe, à la Nordau ([1892] 1968) as well as à la Mantegazza ([1887Mantegazza ([ ] 1995. "Il primo maggio" calls to mind an epistolary novel that was very dear to Capuana, Dopo la laurea by Bolognese professor Camillo De Meis, published in 1868. In this short story, the doctor proposes a sensational thesis to counterbalance the overwhelming power of science and speculation in contemporary positivist society: he advocates a provocative programme of eugenics, which he pompously calls "Coscrizione per l'amore" (Capuana 1897a, 140), aimed at cross-breeding the over-intellectual with "[un] bel bruto" (Capuana 1897a, 142). As far as art goes, however, the doctor voices many of the concerns of positivist society, including the explicit affirmation of the historical superiority of science, that is, of the superiority of thought over art.
A contextual rereading of these short stories highlights the fact that the 1890s, far from being the beginning of the "involuzione" postulated by some critics, are, on the whole, a very sophisticated, very self-reflexive decade as far as Capuana's creative production is concerned, and one accompanied by an equally substantial critical production at the beginning (1892) and at the end of the decade (1898-99). It is equally noticeable that, while female characterisation remains a powerful catalyst for metareferential reflection, self-reflexivity is 26 "Da prima nessuno rise, credendo ognuno che il dolore avesse fatto ammattire il povero baritono" (1897a, 161). Although the relationship between Pirandello and Capuana has been properly eviscerated (see, especially, Sipala 1974) Davies' claim that "the theme of [Capuana's] own umorismo lies untouched" (Davies 1979, 150) remains valid.

• Metareference in l'altro and l'ultimo Capuana
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 100 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, also increasingly vehiculated through different means. The progressive disentanglement from female characterisation is seen in the progression from Spiritismo? (1884) to Mondo occulto, the other, shorter collection of essays written "in modo da poter servire da appendice a […] Spiritismo?" (Capuana 1995, 165), over a decade after the publication of his first collection on the Occult (1896).
The link between Spiritualism and artistic production can in fact be seen in Mondo occulto, albeit in passing and not with the anecdotal depth of Spiritismo?. Here Capuana describes an illustrious artistic household, the Bach family, in what proceeds as a thread of selfreflection mediated by music rather than, as happens in Spiritismo?, by creative writing: "Quest'altro fatto lo riassumo da una narrazione di Alberico Secondo pubblicata nel «Grand Journal», numero del 4 giugno 1865" (183). Unlike in Spiritismo?, the claim here is grounded in verifiable bibliographic references (on this episode, see also Vartier 1972), so what is interesting is the decision to include precisely these materials and not others, as well as to paraphrase the anecdote rather than quoting it directly and/or in translation. In Capuana's rendering of this documento umano: Il figlio del maestro Bach, pronipote del gran Sebastiano Bach, aveva regalato al padre una spinetta stupendamente scolpita. Un giorno il maestro scoprì nell'interno dello strumento una data -aprile 1664 -e il nome del luogo dove essa era stata costruita: Roma. La sera, appena addormentato, gli parve di vedere presso il letto un uomo con lunga barba, scarpe con punta rotonda, calzoni molto larghi, gran collare, e cappello appuntito a larghe falde. Costui gli disse: -La spinetta che tu possiedi mi apparteneva, ed ha servito piu volte a distrarre ii mio signore e re Enrico III. Una volta egli scrisse dei versi che io musicai.

The Twentieth-Century Collections
and Rassegnazione (1907) The same pattern of production with a high self-reflexive coefficient and decreased reliance on female characterisation as a poetological device, can be found in the latter part of Capuana's career, particularly in the collections Il decameroncino and La voluttà di creare, published in 1901 and 1911 respectively, but, as will become clear, also in the other collections published in the intervening years. As suggested by its allusive metanarrative title, Il decameroncino -dedicated to Vittoria Aganoor -contains ten short stories distributed across ten giornate, recounted, in the elite salotto of the aristocrat Baronessa Lanari, by an elderly intellectual, Dottor Maggioli -for Ghidetti "una proiezione sia del dottor Follini [...] di Giacinta [...] che del dottor Mola di Profumo (Capuana 1974b, 259). The ironically Boccaccian framework and themes that intertwine literature and fantasy (Giabakgi 2011) raise the overall level of self-reflexivity of the collection, beginning with "Seconda giornata: L'aggettivo" (giornata 2, 266-71), a tale that dramatises the artistic desire for lexical perfection. It tells the story of Jello Albulo -nom de plume of aspiring poet Nino Bianchi -who, at his mentor's suggestion, searches for the ideal adjective to perfect his latest poetical composition -"Tutto va bene, caro Jello, ma vi manca l'aggettivo!" (267  (Capuana 1995, 165).

• Metareference in l'altro and l'ultimo Capuana
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 102 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, as the title, that may have contributed to the critical assessment of Il decameroncino as an exquisitely désengagé piece of writing that proves not only Capuana's disimpegno but, at this advanced stage of his career, his lack of literary and creative drive: Un giorno, in un sonetto alla sua Liliana (l'aveva ribattezzata con questo purissimo nome, ma i parenti di lei continuavano, con vivo sdegno del giovane poeta, a chiamarla borghesemente Giuseppina) in un sonetto alla sua Liliana egli aveva scritto. (Capuana 1974b, 269) Beneath the ironic attitude towards the self-imposed gravitas of a young, possibly mediocre artist, there is the extremely serious business of form and content, the quintessentially 'Capuanian' endeavour of putting together Quattro, sei versi che dovevano essere il non plus ultra della perfezione della forma; cioè, venti, trenta parole così superbamente allineate e con tale sapiente combinazione e con tale miracoloso impasto, che il ripeterli sotto voce doveva produrre un'estasi deliziosissima […] [e] unicamente in grazia di quel vergine aggettivo. (270) Once again, the overwhelming power of artistic creation, combined with what implicitly emerges as a consciousness prone to both neurosis and more generally fin-de-siècle degeneration, 28 prevails, and the artist in fieri loses, if not his life, then at least his mind: "[M]ugolava suoni incomposti, parole senza senso, povera vittima dell'aggettivo!" (271).
Capuana then makes use of the same model in La voluttà di creare ([1911] 1974c, 239-309), including a slightly modified introduction, and with ten new stories added to those from Il decameroncino. 32 The artistic theme emerges prominently in these additions, too, where it is variously negotiated and deepened along the lines of the form/content and ideal/real binaries.
In "Il busto" (1974c, 274-80), a model almost reaches the point of surrendering his own personality to the bust that a sculptor has made of him. "Doneglia, scultore valentissimo", persuades Maggioli to pose for a bust and the artist manages to produce a sculpture that resembles the model to a staggering degree -"la guardavo con stupore quasi mi fossi sdoppiato" (Capuana 1974c, 276). Maggioli recalls being dazzled to learn that the sculptor has used an actual human skull to facilitate the process of sculpting the head. The closer the artwork approaches completion, the more Maggioli-theprotagonist -Maggioli-the-narrator recalls -perceives "un crescente malessere" (278), almost as if the skull were influencing the model's inner life: "Non mi sentivo più io, ma un po' quell'altro che doveva pensare dentro la testa del busto sotto l'involucro di creta che lo copriva" (1974a, 279). In an outburst of anger and fear, Maggioli destroys the almost completed piece.

• Metareference in l'altro and l'ultimo Capuana
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 106 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, si invisibile quando gli faceva comodo, e interamente, corpo e vestiti. (297) Lastly, "La redenzione dei capilavori" (1974c, 261-6) offers one further version of the Wildean tableau vivant, which was already found in La Sfinge (Pellini 1998). This is the story of a scientist who endeavours to vivify, through Mesmerism, the portrait of an "ignota" by Sebastiano del Piombo (Loria 2005), echoing Van Dyck's Ignota in Spiritismo?. Here the painting is not used for the production of art but, rather, for the production of life. Needless to say, the process is unsuccessful and is abruptly ended by the death of the professore. Thus, the contingencies of personal history prevent the artistic work from achieving autonomy, in a further sign that, as in La Sfinge, the times are not yet ready for the identification of arte and vita.
Much as in Il decameroncino, it is the structure that determines our overall reading of the collection, meaning that, as Failli notes, "ci troviamo di fronte non a novelle isolate e autonome, ma a parti di una raccolta organica, che esibisce marcatamente la propria strutturazione narrativa" (Failli 1985, 131). Challenging the merely science fictional reading proposed by Ghidetti (1974) among others, Failli convincingly shows how it is the very accumulation of frameworks that provokes the weakening of the effect of reality: the narrator is supposedly reporting Maggioli's anecdotes, presenting them as 'true stories', but at the same time, recasting them in an incredulous, skeptical light, which is shared by the rest of the salotto. The sense of incredulity is increased by the fact that the narrator himself, despite puzzling declarations of veracity -"Ogni volta che io racconto in questo salotto qualcuna di quelle che lei chiama storielle, io racconto fatti da me veduti, dei quali posso affermare, fin con giuramento, la veridicità" (296) -is often just the confidante of somebody who tells the story, rather than a direct witness. These multiple levels of "mediazione di realtà" (Failli 1985, 144) greatly interfere with the mimesis and "è proprio l'interdipendenza fra cornice, racconti, prefazione e Conclusione [...] che sembra proporre una discorso marcatamente meta-narrativo" (149). Whilst, in the storyworld, Maggioli's ambiguity might legitimately puzzle his (post)naturalist fin-desiècle audience when compared to his apparent scientific credibility, beyond the storyworld this 'final' revelation cannot come as a surprise to the reader, who has already been alerted quite explicitly by the opening paratext: "Quel caro vecchietto del dottor Maggioli [...] seppe [...] inventare lì per lì tante novelle senza mai far sospettare che le improvvisasse" (Capuana 1974b, 260).
Highlighting the high self-reflexivity of the two collections that respectively open and close the first decade of the new century encourages further enquiry into the works produced in-between. Critics have also noted how in the 'intermediate' collections Delitto ideale Zuccala
Ferrara shows how, in Delitto ideale (Capuana 1974c, 329-454), three elements concur to shape the collection. Two of these elements point directly to self-reflexivity: alongside the "emarginazione netta del racconto in terza persona", there is the "complessità dell'impianto enunciativo" and the "macroscopica interferenza tra i piani del racconto e del discorso" (Ferrara 1985, 63), which jointly allow a "tematizzazione delle tecniche narrative" (Vannocci 1985, 119). This is achieved either -in first-person narratives such as "Oh, che silenzio" or "L'inesplicabile" -through blurring the monologic line between the time of the story and the time of its narration -or through the opposite procedure, overemphasising the dialogic nature of the racconto itself to the point where, again, the narration prevails over the 'story'. This creates, Ferrara believes, "una struttura a incastro" (1985, 66), juxtaposing either two or even three "livelli narrativi". Stories like "Delitto ideale", "La evocatrice", "Suggestione", and "Un consulto" adhere to this model. According to Ferrara, the departure from the previous Appassionate (whose self-reflexive element has, nonetheless, been ignored by critics) lies in the emphasis on the compositional level of the collection (narration), corroborated by the strong thematic presence of the ideal/real binary: L'opposizione tra reale e immaginario [...] fissa l'attenzione soprattutto sulle modalità di tale rappresentazione. Lo sperimentalismo dichiarato di questa raccolta di novelle ha infatti la conseguenza più vistosa ed importante nel carattere allusivamente metanarrativo del libro, che ha i suoi precedenti più diretti in Spiritismo? e che costituisce a sua volta un precedente fondamentale di Coscienze. (Ferrara 1985, 85-6) In this syncretism of themes, where all previous tropes are brought together with partially new ones, the "gender and narrative" 35 link resurfaces briefly in the short story "Dolore senza nome" (Capuana 1974b, 393-9), where "il giovane scultore Vittorio D'Areba" wrestles with a bozzetto he has vastly underestimated. 36 The proliferation of livelli narrativi that characterises the collection is made manifest in the same way that the (perceived) creative failures of Vittorio manifest themselves: "[L]a tormentata figura femminile apparsagli dinan-Zuccala 4 • Metareference in l'altro and l'ultimo Capuana zi, come balzata a un tratto fuori dal nulla" quickly becomes a "bozzetto" with which the artist subsequently struggles unsuccessfully for weeks and months. He is incapable of completing either il bozzetto, which is in itself by definition an incomplete version, a preparatory work for what then has to be rendered in marble, or the final sculpture. What distinguishes this work from the previous stories is not so much the prominence of the levels of tormento and dolore that accompany the inability of an artist to complete his work, which were already very prominent in the suicidal conclusion of La Sfinge, but the fact that, possibly for the first time, there is a collective voice of the artist's entourage intervening to contradict what the artist thinks of himself and his work. Upon seeing this incomplete sculpture, his friend Giulio Nolli -who echoes in nuce many of the views Capuana expresses in his essays -finds it "un portento [...]: Hai fatto il tuo capolavoro. Non farai niente di meglio in avvenire, te lo dico io", and continues, elucidating: "quest'opera ha un solo irrimediabile difetto [...] dovrà rimanere quel che è, un bozzetto. Nessuna abilità di esecutore potrà tradurlo in marmo conservandone la freschezza del tocco".
In Capuana, post-Decameroncino, capturing the incompleteness of the idea is at once the best and only path that is left to the artist. Vittorio should not despair, nor must he take his own life. On the contrary, he can, and will 'baptise' his work in a self-reflexive, metacompositional fashion "Dolore senza nome", indeed 'unnamable pain', foreseeing success with both public and critics: "Sentirai che scoppio alla prossima esposizione!" (Capuana 1974c, 399). To corroborate and strengthen this metalevel of the collection, an element that has escaped critical attention must be noted: the greater use of dedications. Uniquely in Capuana, in fact, fourteen out of the fifteen short stories that comprise the collection are individually dedicated to prominent intellectuals with whom Capuana was known to have professional and personal relations, ranging from Federico De Roberto to Grazia Deledda. 37 Similarly, the presence of meta-and paratextual elements and of strategies to highlight the level of narration at the expense of aesthetic illusion and immersion -such as, most noticeably, irony -characterises Coscienze, published three years later. In this case too: "Il distacco dalla psicologia delle Appassionate si esprime in direzione più esplicitamente metanarrativa" (Vannocci 1985, 120). Unlike Le appassionate, there is no authentic thematic unity amongst the nine-37 The full list of dedicatees is: Federico De Roberto, L. Antonio Villari, Jolanda, Guelfo Civinini, Amilcare Lauria, Jane Grey, Salvatore Li Greci, Grazia Deledda, Mariano Salluzzo, Bruna (surname-less), Giuseppe Costanzo, Fanny Zampini Salazar, Cordelia, Giuseppe Dragonetto. A 6/14 female ratio is significant, albeit admittedly not impressive by modern standards.

• Metareference in l'altro and l'ultimo Capuana
teen short stories 38 in the collection. Acknowledging a thematic fragmentation that is taken even further than in Delitto -to the point where only five short stories can be grouped together on the basis of a paesano theme -Vannocci astutely groups the short stories by compositional strategies: two dialogues, three monologues, 39 five stories within the story, 40 and three "finzion[i] epistolar [i]" (1985, 88). 41 It is apparent how, in texts like "In vino veritas" (the second short story, 1974c, 45-51), for example, Viosci's drunken account of his alleged murder is doubly framed within a first-person narration that, on the whole, produces the usual 'bracketing effect' towards reality: Aveva detto la verità? Nel suo cervello offuscato dai fumi del vino i fatti si erano alterati? Risette era stata davvero salvata all'ospedale da quel tentativo di soffocazione? O neppur il tentativo era avvenuto? Non ho mai avuto coraggio di accertarmene. (51) In "Eligio Norsi" (52-61) it is again a double narratorial frame that encloses a rather macabre metanarration of art and death, in which a painter rescues his young muse from drowning, falls deeply in love with her and initiates her into the visual arts. 42 He subsequently finds himself driven to take his own life as a result of his inability to provide for both of them: "Povero Eligio Norsi, a cui l'arte non ha saputo all'ultimo dar tanto da sfamarlo ogni giorno!" (61). "Eligio" highlights a facet of the artistic profession -the financial constraints -that marred Capuana's life 43 as well as that of many fellow writers, such as Verga and Pirandello. In "Esitanze" (1974c, 77-81), the theatrical script-like layout of the narration 44 frames a woman's hesitation about surrendering to the advances of a charming barone: the mimetic depth reached by her thoughts contrasts starkly with the systematic piercing of the "fourth wall" of the imaginary stage for which this short story seems conceived.
Therefore, the self-reflexivity of collections such as Delitto ideale and Coscienze emerges -through an uneven combination of (a few) metanarrative hints and a dense, sustained layer of experimen-38 All of these were previously published between 1902 and 1905.

• Metareference in l'altro and l'ultimo Capuana
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 110 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative, tal framings and structural strategies -in a way that is perhaps less deliberate and less obvious than in works such as Il decameroncino. Yet, along the framing lines of Wolf's notion of gradable metareferentiality, and even without going so far as to consider these late collections as 'fundamentally' works of self-reflexive creative writing, the above-cited critical opinions and textual evidence undeniably contribute to the idea that the last phase of Capuana's career is marked by a heavy self-reflexive and metareferential component. 45 This empirical intuition, to be fully explored and theorised in our concluding remarks, is corroborated by an examination of Capuana's last and, until very recently, little considered novel, Rassegnazione (1900, partial, in journal sections; 1907 entire, in volume). Davies believes that this novel is a clunky attempt, on Capuana's part, "to associate himself with the new avant-garde […] and it is a work which betrays the intellectual weariness and the melancholy of the period" (1979,106). Davies essentially sees the novel as another (after La Sfinge) polemical exercise against the fashionable author of the moment, d'Annunzio, and stresses how the episodes inspired by d'Annunzio's Le vergini delle rocce "form a weighty central section of the novel (Chapters 9 to 20)" (109). Oliva (1979, 105-29) also focuses on the intertextual contaminations from d'Annunzio's Le vergini delle rocce (1895) and, less significantly, L'innocente; and Storti Abate, while substantially ascribing the work to the genre of the 'philosophical' novel, reads it in an anti-Dannunzian key (1989,136).
However, Paul Barnaby (2017) has truly brought to light the depth of the Dannunzian hypotext by meticulously tracing d'Annunzio-related patterns, crucially underlining how the novel neither uncritically accepts, nor simply rejects, nor just mocks, nor merely pays homage to d'Annunzio. This "most ambitious response to the challenges presented by D'Annunzio's work" (433) comments (meta)narratively on d'Annunzio's aesthetic progression, by implicitly privileging the earlier Romanzi della rosa over the later d'Annunzio of the Superuomo. Barnaby argues that the dannunzianesimo of the novel is itself not a monolithic assessment but rather a multifaceted commentary (437), showing how the novel promotes a discourse presenting an articulate critique of "a combination of positivist analysis and a vestigial idealism which renders that analysis destructive" (439). Each section thematically alludes to a different work by d'Annunzio. To be specific: Chapters 1 to 8, describing Dario's childhood, allude to Il trionfo della morte; Chapters 9-14, containing the "first attempt to father a superuomo", thematically borrow from Le vergini delle rocce; Chap-ters 15-21, which describe the second procreational attempt, borrow from L'innocente; Chapters 21-22, devoted to Dario's Milanese quest for pleasure, allude to Il piacere. From a self-referential point of view, neither d'Annunzio nor his works are mentioned or alluded to in a way that breaks through the boundaries of the storyworld. The intertextual level might therefore be picked up only by a reader who is familiar with Capuana's key critical works on d'Annunzio, such as the pivotal essay on Il piacere, in Libri e teatro (1892).
In the apparent absence of metafiction, it may be judicious to consider the plausibility of a metanarrative formulation that is indeed clear and prominent. In particular, in this novel of formation, the metanarrative making of a poetological point is enabled through the juxtaposition of two characters. There is the character of the inetto protagonist, the Bildungsheld, who, despising his father's lucrative trade, ineffectually aspires to a life of literary glory, and therefore pursues the life of a 'decadent' in an attempt to create art through life itself. Then there is Bissi, a childhood friend who has found success as a novelist by doing precisely the opposite: by turning life experiences into art. What Bissi does, in other words, is to start from the documento umano/'case study' of life experience and rework it through the power of riflessione, fantasia and immaginazione in order to recreate those experiences in the superior form of literature. Even at a metanarrative level that does not account for referential links either to the fin-de-siècle literary scene or the works by d'Annunzio -and even without the (obvious) 'polemical' layer of antidannunzianesimo being worked into the equation by contemporary scholars keen to dissect Capuana's text -Rassegnazione appears to succeed in reinforcing Capuana's lifelong commitment to a universal message regarding how a successful, a 'living' piece of fiction ought to be produced. By applying this formula, Bissi 'post-verista' succeeds in his literary endeavours, much as, metafictionally, the post-verista author of Rassegnazione succeeds in bringing his novel to completion.

A Self-Reflexive Verista Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative Brian Zuccala
Concluding Remarks: 'Distant Reading' Capuana Self-Reflexive Verista A close examination of the main instances of metareference and/ or autofiction in Capuana's narrative works demonstrates an intrinsic "hermeneutic pressure" (borrowing from Barolini) towards a progressive departure from the specifics of the single art piece. Analysing at the level of the single piece of writing invites a contextualisation that is either editorial (within a collection), generic (within a genre), or chronological (within a period or section) and, at the same time, none of these partial contextualisations seem fully exhaustive from an exegetic perspective.
The way I have approached the discussion of self-reflection in Capuana's fiabe is a case in point. There, metareferential tension surfaces intermittently in ways not clearly restricted to a single collection, nor to one neat time frame (such as a specific decade). Thus, the best way to make sense of it would be to look at it across the entire oeuvre. An 'ultimate', all-encompassing contextualisation is precisely what these concluding remarks aim to achieve, in an attempt to make sense of self-reflexivity as an overarching creative choice in the work of Capuana.
When "distant reading" 1 self-reflexivity by approaching it at this macroscopic level , two basic trends emerge: first, the 1 As Moretti himself explains on several occasions (see at least 2017) the notions of 'distance' and 'distancing' are the crucial ones and precede the use of Information Technology, to which 'distant reading' as a literary methodology has nonetheless been largely associated.

Concluding Remarks: 'Distant Reading' Capuana Self-Reflexive Verista
Italianistica. Nuova serie 2 114 A Self-Reflexive Verista: Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana's Narrative,[113][114][115][116] sheer amount of self-reflexivity overall appears to increase progressively; second, the obvious and immediately accessible term of comparison for narrative theorisation is critical writing, in which Capuana was prolific. In this regard, there is a counter-trend in his production of critical works, which decreases to the point of virtually disappearing after 1899, with the exception of the relatively minor collection Lettere alla assente (1904) 2 and some university lectures. If we juxtapose these two tendencies and analyse them in combination, an interesting joint pattern emerges: Capuana appears to produce self-reflexive narrative intermittently, and almost in alternation to his theoretical production: his highly self-reflexive texts continue his theoretical discourse in the intervals of his critical production: • In the early years of his career (1864-72), when Capuana is in Firenze writing for La Nazione and compiling his first major critical collection, Il teatro italiano, critical production dominates and there is no self-reflexive work (as well as very little narrative production, for that matter). • In the following years (1873-77), dominated by the composition of the markedly self-reflexive works Profili di donne and "Un caso di sonnanbulismo", there is indeed narrative production -the first Giacinta is conceived and composed in the 1875-79 period -yet little or no critical production takes place. • In the period of the major 'naturalist' novels Giacinta (1879,1886,1889) and Profumo (1890-92), Capuana is responsible for four major and career-defining critical collections -Studi 1 (1880), Studi 2 (1882), Per l'arte (1885), Libri e teatro (1892a) -and very limited self-reflexive work, emerging only episodically and in the gaps between critical works, such as the short stories "Evoluzione" (1883), "Il piccolo archivio" (1886), "Avventura" (1888), and the hybrid form of autofictional anecdotes inserted into Spiritismo?. • The same pattern is repeated more vigorously in the 1890s, a decade that opens with some pivotal critical writings (Libri e teatro). In the years that follow this major critical intervention (1893-97), critical writing decreases to the point of almost disappearing 3 and self-reflexive publications proliferate, with the publication of Fausto Bragia e altre novelle and La Sfinge, as well as the self-reflexive components of Le appassionate and Ricordi di infanzia. The decade then closes with a period of dense critical output (two major collections, Gli 'ismi' contemporanei, 1898 and Cronache letterarie, 1899).
• This progression where self-reflexive narrative occurs in place of criticism stricto sensu, in the years of diminished or no critical production, intensifies in the last phase of his career. In this period, Capuana reduces his critical production to a few, rather unoriginal university lectures, restating the same core creative principles, and some scattered articles (such as Capuana 1902b;. Once this pattern has been identified, it becomes plain that it is not at odds with Capuana's supposedly 'naturalist' creative convictions nor does it mark some sort of intellectual decay. It is, in fact, aligned with, and can be examined through, the critical and metanarrative ideas previously illustrated. and "alle teoriche bado poco, chiedo lavori, lavori, lavori!" (1898, 5). On the contrary, he reiterates the need for attaining a "forma viva e solida" (1899, V), embodying an idea in a character, so as to touch the reader's nerves and emotions: "Un'emozione [artistica] è affare di nervi […] un'opera d'arte che non desti nessuna emozione […] non è più un'opera d'arte!" (1994,46). It is on this basis that he praised Goethe, Shakespeare and a few other masters of the artistic form. By combining these statements with those examined above on the progressive and inevitable penetration of speculative thought into art (see also Capuana 1884, 216, and1994, 43), it is possible to venture an answer to the question that arises when observing this phenomenon: why does Capuana progressively seem to abandon critical writing and invest all his energies -not only creative, but also theoretical -in self-reflexive writing? For Capuana, contemporary novelistic form is suffused with speculative thought, which may also be self-reflexive because, as he clearly states in Studi sulla letteratura contemporanea: Prima serie: "[L'] opera d'arte [moderna] [è] un tutto vivente che [h]a in se stesso gli elementi e la ragione della propria vita" (1880, 290). It would thus also seem logical for a good artwork to 'use' -more or less explicitly -its constitutive theoretical principles to fuel its own narrative. If art is destined to dissolve into pure thought, then, by extension, pure thought, the speculative thought of (artistic) reflection, not only can, but inevitably will itself become art, and it should therefore be expressed by artistic means, that is, with as balanced a synthesis of form and content as possible. At the turn of the century, with art still tied to its imperfect material support, only self-reflexive writing seems able to position itself at the intersection of these two pro-gressions: it is certainly art that engages readers and their emotions, yet the blending of form and content expresses, to some extent, 'pure thought'; that is: reflection on art itself. In confirmation of the advanced nature of this 'narratological' intuition on Capuana's part, one needs only to recall how Werner Wolf illustrates artistic selfreflection from the point of view of reader-response: When metaphenomena occur in the media, as a rule they are not merely offered as (elements of) a theoretical metadiscourse to the recipients' reflection such as argumentative articles on literature, music or the arts, but enable the recipients to experience metareference so that metaisation in the media becomes 'applied metareference'. (2009,33) A conceptualisation of this kind demonstrates how self-reflexivity is exactly what Capuana has been searching for, a 'felt' reflection that is in itself experienced as an artistic phenomenon. Narrative, then, intrinsically presents itself to Capuana as the most perfect and historically advanced synthesis of form and content: 'perfect' because it provides the 'sensations' and 'impressions' that are indispensable -in Capuana's theory -for an authentic and "viv[o]" work of art. It also represents that degree of reflection, of 'pure thought' that would become increasingly important -again, according to Capuana himself -in the future evolution of art. It is self-reflexive narrative (more than 'just' narrative) that provides the ultimate answer to Capuana's pessimism and potential aesthetic disorientation. Self-reflexive writing represents the first step towards the further evolution of genres anticipated by his theory: if 'pure thought' is what literature is fated to become, 4 and this pure thought is nonetheless authentic Art, capable of touching the sensibility of readers and stirring their emotions, then a speculative discourse on the very essence of art, successfully incarnated in living characters, appears as the quintessential realisation of such an artistic principle. In the light of these theoretical and (meta)narrative considerations, it is logical, then, for Capuana progressively to lean towards the artistic form that might initially seem most incompatible with Verismo as the definitive choice for his career as a narrator.
4 See also the lecture La scienza della letteratura: "Il Pensiero […] saprà trarre lui, dalla babelica confusione presente […] altre forme letterarie più elevate, più perfette di quelle prodotte finora; se pure […] non butterà sdegnosamente via l'ingombro di ogni forma per funzionare ed agire soltanto come puro Pensiero" (Capuana 1902b, 19 18,38,48,55, Università Ca'Foscari Venezia With a Preface by Edwige Comoy Fusaro, this volume is one of few monographs on Italian post-Risorgimento author Luigi Capuana, and the first one written in English in more than forty years. Narratology and critical theory are combined with more 'traditional', historical-philological criticism to offer a radical rereading of the author's narrative. Central to this study is the seemingly counter-intuitive notion of artistic self-reflexivity, which represents an innovative take on an author like Capuana, who has long been 'canonised' as a verista.