This collection draws on cutting-edge work that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries to offer new perspectives on the importance of visuality and the imagination in the work of Luigi Pirandello, the great Italian modernist. The volume re-examines traditional critical notions central to the study of Pirandello by focusing on the importance of the visual imagination in his poetics and aesthetics, an area of multimedia investigation which has not yet received ample attention in English-language books. Putting scholarship on Pirandello in conversation with new work on the multimedia dimensions of modernism, the volume examines how Pirandello worked across and was adapted through multiple media. It also brings Pirandello into a cross-disciplinary dialogue with new approaches to Italian cultural studies to show how his work remains relevant to scholarly conversations across the field. The essays in this collection highlight the ways in which Pirandello is engaged not only in literature and theatre but also in the visual arts, film, and music. At the same time, they emphasize the ways in which this multimedia creativity enables Pirandello to pursue complex philosophical thoughts, and how scholars' interpretation of his works can provide new insights into problems facing us today. Crossing from aesthetics and a study of modernist notions of creative imagination into studies of multimedia works and adaptations, the volume argues that Pirandello should be understood as a thinker in images whose legacy can be felt across the arts and into the realm of 21st-century theories of literary cognition.

A unique insight into the story of the love between Italian writer Pirandello, and his muse, actress Marta Abba. Between 1925 and 1936, Luigi Pirandello wrote to the actress Marta Abba some 552 letters, a correspondence that remained enveloped in mystery for more than half a century. The letters are a splendid record of the vicissitudes of their decade-long relationship. This book grew out of the author's reflections on Pirandello's correspondence and relationship with Marta Abba, as well as his own relationship with Marta in the course of his research in the 1980s, when he was invited by Marta to edit Pirandello's letters. Over several months, the author worked side-by-side with Marta, reading and copying Piradello's letters in the bank where she kept them. Later, they would discuss and organize the copies and the rest of the materials she had at home, which included her own letters to Pirandello. This book sketches out the story of a modern romance between author and actress, between an artist and his collaborating muse, between an older man and a younger woman. It also tackles the subject of Marta's sexuality, a little-known aspect of her life.