Enrico Annibale Butti: the Case of the Minor Writer (PDF)

INTRODUCTION (p. 1)

The focus of this work is twofold. It re-examines, on one hand, the principal works of Enrico Annibale Butti, with the purpose of weighing his place in literary history. It attempts to probe the striking discrepancy between the popularity that E. A. Butti, as he called himself, had during his lifetime, and his subsequent oblivion.

Inevitably, a discussion of a minor writer such as Butti turns to the more generalized yet more problematic discussion centering around the concept of the minor writer. The attempt to clarify and define the elusive character of the minor writer is the second, but by no means secondary, purpose of the present work.

Among the many writers and playwrights who lived and worked in Milan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Enrico Annibale Butti distinguishes himself for his great versatility, and for his unusually keen ability to capture in his work the spirit of change that characterized late nineteenth-century society.

He experimented with prose, poetry, and literary criticism, but the theater, however, became his preferred genre. Butti was a believer in the power of language as rhetorical and persuasive tool, consequently he believed in the many possibilities open to the theater not only as an art form but as a didactic tool. A profound idealist, Butti discovered in the theater the best means to provide to the public an arena for intellectual debate.

Ironically, Butti`s novels were better received than his theater, and he was frequently criticized for his attempt to bring to the stage subjects that were too explosive, thereby lessening the enjoyment that the public demanded. Nonetheless, Butti persisted in this genre, blaming his failures on unsophisticated audiences.

He insisted that [1]`opera d`arte rappresentativa, che abbia ricevuto

il soffio vitale e innovatore del genio, è dunque

destinata per necessità di cose a incontrare al suo

apparire su le scene le

Dieses eBook können Sie uneingeschränkt auf allen Geräten der tolino Familie lesen. Zum Lesen auf sonstigen eReadern und am PC benötigen Sie eine Adobe ID.