O VAMPIRO DE LUIGI CAPUANA TEXTOS FANTÁSTICOS SOB A PENA DE UM MESTRE REALISTA

Abstract

Luigi Capuana, either as an author of literary texts or even as a critic, is certainly classified as one of the most responsible for the consolidation of verismo, an Italian realist current inspired mainly by French naturalism. Throughout his literary career, Capuana has been catalogued for his critical fortune, except for brief and rare caveats, as a writer bound to an objective and impersonal aesthetic, although his work, on the whole, offers a broader versatility than what is normally debated in critical texts and contains fictions ranging from fables, through horror and science fiction, to realistic writing. We propose, in this paper, to strengthen his relationship with the verista school, but, more than that, we will take care of exposing his less known works, and no less relevant, which precisely evidence the versatile character of his narrative prose. In the last section, we will focus on the analysis of the short story “Un vampiro” (1904), the one that perhaps best synthesizes its stylistics, based on the dynamics of the fantastic character and the production of the effects of fear.