She-Wolf and Other Stories

The She-Wolf and Other Stories, translated and introduced by Giovanni Cecchetti, presents the definitive English collection of Giovanni Verga’s most powerful short fiction, placing the Sicilian master of *verismo* in his full literary and historical context. Verga began his career with sentimental novels modeled on French writers like Dumas fils, but his true artistic breakthrough came when he turned to the lives of Sicilian peasants and fishermen. With *Nedda* (1874) and, more decisively, *Vita dei Campi* (1880), Verga abandoned aristocratic melodrama for a stark, lyrical realism that revealed the elemental struggles of the poor: hunger, jealousy, passion, and resignation to fate. Cecchetti situates Verga’s work within Italian realism, distinguishing it from French naturalism by its emphasis on instinctive human drives rather than pseudoscientific analysis, and underscores the originality of Verga’s narrative technique, especially his pioneering use of free indirect style that allowed peasants and villagers to “narrate themselves.”The stories gathered here trace the evolution of Verga’s vision. In *Vita dei Campi*, pieces such as “The She-Wolf,” “Cavalleria Rusticana,” and “Ieli” dramatize passions that erupt with tragic inevitability, their rural settings inseparable from human destiny. Later collections like *Novelle Rusticane* grow darker, presenting men and women as helpless victims of poverty, greed, or destructive desire, while the late stories reveal a bitter, sometimes cynical humor. Cecchetti emphasizes how Verga’s style—compressed, impersonal, infused with the rhythms of Sicilian dialect—renders external landscape as the inner life of his characters, whether in the scorching sun, the barren plain of Catania, or the toil of shepherds and fishermen. This revised and enlarged edition includes a broadened selection of *Novelle Rusticane* and later tales, along with a translation that preserves Verga’s economy of language and narrative immediacy. The result is an indispensable volume that reintroduces one of Italy’s greatest modern storytellers to an English-speaking readership.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1973.