New developments in digital philology are increasingly moving towards a dynamic view of the text. This dynamism has stimulated an ever closer union between philology and computer science, which work synergistically to provide a representation of the work not so much as a static product, but as a writing process, subject to interventions by the author at varying intervals over time.
The manuscript materials of Pirandello's work are largely lost, at present. Many of them will be recovered in this National Edition, mostly thanks to the astute and accurate research work of Annamaria Andreoli. In any case, the current gaps in the autographs do not prevent us from grasping the complexity of Pirandello's work on his own texts, which underwent linguistic reworking and stylistic revision in each edition, tangible signs of a constantly evolving poetics.
In our edition, we have compared the texts using a synoptic table, which allows for an immediate visualization of the differences between the various editions and thus provides an overview of the ‘paths’ of a word, an expression, or a narrative sequence. Our aim is to offer a philological reading of the work that is also accessible to non-specialists, who are presented with an open textual system that has scope and complexity that they will be able to embrace.
While the Comparative Editions offer an overview of the linguistic and stylistic evolution of Pirandello's works, the edition provided with the traditional apparatus of variants is an indispensable tool for scholars, philologists, and language historians.
