Il laboratorio dello stile. Sondaggi nel 'Taccuino di Harvard' di Luigi Pirandello

In 1998 my colleague Ombretta Frau and I found an unpublished notebook by Luigi Pirandello at the Houghton Library (Harvard University) and we worked for three years on its critical edition. Our work was published in 2002 by the publishing house Mondadori in Milan, Italy.;In 1997 Annamaria Andreoli published another notebook held by Pirandello during the years between 1912 and 1925. In her introductory essay she points out the lack of attention scholars reserved to Pirandello's work-notes and wishes that other documents of this nature will be soon published and properly studied. Andreoli also draws literary critics' attention to the other Pirandello's notebooks, which are kept at the Pirandello Library-Museum in Agrigento (Sicily). She stresses the fact that only a few fragments of these precious materials are published in an obsolete and philologically inaccurate version (dating back to 1939) and none of them have been analyzed.;A few years after the publication of Andreoli's work, another Pirandello's notebook is coming to light and its critical edition supplies a solid basis for a deep analysis of the document itself. Nevertheless the comment and the introductory essay that Ms Frau and I are proposing cannot be exhaustive of the subject matter.;The purpose for my research is to explore the 'laboratory' of Luigi Pirandello's style and the genesis of some of his poetry collections---especially Zampogna and Fuori di chiave---in the light of the Taccuino di Harvard. One of the most interesting sections of the cahier is a long list of words and sentences with no apparent relationship to one another. A considerable part of it is the result of a very accurate lexicon study and research conducted through some of the most prestigious Nineteenth century Italian dictionaries; other notes reveal some interesting and so far unknown sources of Pirandello's writing. In this work I will study these sections of the notebook in order to show how Pirandello created his own style and language. In the last chapter I will focus on some drafts of poems in order to reconstruct the complex and fascinating process through which a specific text reaches its definitive form and content.