Sparrow (and other stories)
by Giovanni Verga
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Italy has a long history of short story writing -going back to Boccaccio (d. 1375) - and most of Italy's major writers produced collections of novelle. One of the greatest exponents is Giovanni Verga. The themes of his major novels are to be found in his short stories. Verga embraced verismo, the Italian form of French naturalism, where authorial comment and description is at a minimum. He creates an atmosphere and emotions in his writing which transcend the world of his characters, mainly show more Sicilian fishermen and peasants, and which give it a lyrical almost epic character. Although Verga writes about a small enclosed world, his work has universal appeal, touching the heart without lecturing or sentimentalising. This volume offers a wider and more varied selection of Verga's prose than has been published in English before and has been taken from four collections published between 1876 and 1887. show lessTags
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164+ Works 3,755 Members
A Sicilian, like Leonardo Sciascia and Luigi Pirandello, Verga was educated as a writer in Florence and Milan but drew on Sicily for the subject of his chief novels, plays, and short stories. In 1895 he returned permanently to Catania, his Sicilian birthplace, but by then he had already written his best novels of fictional realism (verismo): show more Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree)Malavoglia (1881) and Mastro-don Gesualdo (Master don Gesualdo) (1889), the first dealing with a family of poor Sicilian fishermen, the second with the social climbing of a stonemason who has made a fortune. These classic works of realism established Verga as the father of the nineteenth-century Italian novel. In fact, D. H. Lawrence translated several of his novellas, calling him, "the greatest writer of Italian fiction since Manzoni."Of greater international fame has been Verga's novella Cavalleria Rusticana (Rustic Chivalry) (1880), which provided the libretto for Mascagni's famous opera. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, General Fiction
- DDC/MDS
- 853.8 — Literature & rhetoric Italian, Romanian & related literatures Italian fiction Later 19th century 1859–1900
- LCC
- PQ4841 .C482 — Language and Literature French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese literatures Italian literature Individual authors, 1900-1960
- BISAC
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- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 2
- ASINs
- 1
