Mind Plays : Essays on Luigi Pirandello's Theater

Luigi Pirandello is one of the great masters of twentieth-century drama. His plays, Enrico IV (Henry IV, 1922) and Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1921, 1925) are classics of the modern stage. Mind Plays: Essays on Luigi Pirandello's Theater sets these and other of his plays in the personal and intellectual climate that preceded and followed World War I and hastened the abandonment of many of the cultural myths that had previously dominated society. In their dialectics of art and life, love and hate, identity and truth, fixity and growth, and their examinations of the natures of play, belief, madness, and fact, Pirandello's dramas challenged society to move in new, more modern directions and possibilities. Mind Plays explores the natures and backgrounds of these challenges and possibilities. Book jacket.

Jerome Mazzaro recently retired from the State University of New York at Buffalo where he was a Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature