Pirandello Proto-Modernist

Luigi Pirandello’s first novel L’esclusa , completed in its earliest form in 1893, straddles two literary worlds. On the one hand, it is clearly rooted in the late nineteenth-century realist mode, especially that of Italian verismo . On the other, Pirandello employs a style and an approach to narrative that anticipate both the theory of writing he would later lay out in his long essay L’umorismo [ On Humour ] (1908), and the kinds of experimental writing that one associates with the author’s lat