"Le Appassionate" in camera oscura

The grant is intended to investigate the effects of the plot between photography, psychiatry and literary invention in the collection Le Appassionate of Luigi Capuana. in which emerge the writer’s interest against the psychiatric science and mystery of the human mind. Place in the cultural context of Darwin’s century, the stories in question testify to the spread in Italy the latest medical theories on hysteria, magnetism, and somnambulism and effects on narrative techniques. Le Appassionate, portrayed with the analytical precision of a scientist and an amateur photographer, helping to build the paradigm of the hysterical woman in the late nineteenth century.