Representations of the Kingdom of Italy in Verga’s short-stories.

Author(s)

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18352/inc27694

Keywords:

Verga, National Unification, Estrangement, People, Modernity

Abstract

From the patriotic structure of his early novels (I carbonari della montagna, 1861, and Amore e patria, unpublished) to the ironic and caustic representation of the Carbonarist conspiracies in Mastro-don Gesualdo (1888–89), Verga's fiction deals with the reality of contemporary Italy through a progressive awareness of the relative and problematic nature of national unification. This article analyses the representation of the Kingdom of Italy in a selection of short stories from  Novelle rusticane ('Cos’è il re'), Per le vie ('Via Crucis', 'Camerati') and Vagabondaggio ('…e chi vive si dà pace'). The theme of alterity seems to fit within a framework that transcends the social and geographical dimension that marked the otherness of Aci Trezza's, taking on instead a more existential dimension.

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Author Biography

  • Nicole Valeri, University of Siena

    Nicole Valeri is a Phd Student in “Philology and Literary Criticism” at the University of Siena and at KU Leuven. Her research interests focus on the Nineteenth-century literature, mainly on the history of novel in Italian literature and on the intertextual relationship between Italian and French literature. Her recent work explores the representation of objects and the problem of materiality in some Italian authors from the late Nineteenth-century (Verga, d’Annunzio, De Roberto).

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Published

2025-12-01

Issue

Vol. 40 No. 1 (2025): Special Issue - Between Rhetoric and Engagement: The Image of Italy in Literature from Unification to Verismo

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2025 Nicole Valeri

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Valeri, N. (2025) “Representations of the Kingdom of Italy in Verga’s short-stories”., Incontri. Rivista europea di studi italiani, 40(1), pp. 105–116. doi:10.18352/inc27694.