The chapter uses a discussion of Pirandello’s theoretical essay On Humor to place his idea on comic literature in the broader contexts of his career, of international comic literary traditions, and of thought on humor in relation to contemporary developments in psychology, philosophy, and literature studies. The essay approaches On Humor as both a declaration of a personal poetics and a sort of manifesto, describing its structure, content, and the way Pirandello uses it to position his own work within – and sometimes opposed to – literary traditions in Italy and, in particular, the rest of Europe. A central point that emerges from the essay is how deeply attuned Pirandello was to international advances in various fields, responding to such figures as Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson, even as he was particularly wedded to his Italian forebears.

Luigi Pirandello engaged in a “battle of ideas” with two key figures of early twentieth-century Italian philosophical culture, Benedetto Croce and Adriano Tilgher. Pirandello criticized Croce’s separation of art and science, arguing that they form an interconnected unity. He also criticized Croce’s aesthetics and the separation of intuition from thought, which for Pirandello were both essential to the making of any work of art. Consequently, Croce provided disparaging remarks on Pirandello’s theatre that became very influential among contemporary literary critics. In contrast, Tilgher was one of the first critics to analyze Pirandello’s work with hermeneutical attention and is credited with creating the term pirandellismo. Influenced by Simmel and Bergson, and rejecting all types of metaphysics, Tilgher defended the autonomy of art while also acknowledging its capacity to interpret and reflect cultural contexts. However, Tilgher gradually took a critical stance in respect to Pirandello, both for political reasons and for a controversy over the famous “life/form” critical formulation, which Tilgher claimed as his own invention, while evidence shows that it was extrapolated from Pirandello’s writing.

Arguing its relevance in historiography, and its connection with the related concept of the classic, this chapter examines the place of the canon in history: its formation, key turning points, convenience, usefulness, and the desirability of its existence itself. In the first part of the chapter (‘Constructions’), I examine the five main turning points in the formation of the canon in history: Greco-Roman, Collingwood-Croce, narrative history of the 1970s, gender and postcolonial, and global canon. The second part of the chapter (‘Canonizing’) examines three case studies of the canon in history: Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Macaulay’s History of England and White’s Metahistory. The third part (‘Resistances’) explores the rejection of the canon among historians, describes some of its manifestations and reflects on its motivations. The fourth part (‘Paradoxes’) details the main characteristics of the historical canon, points out the differences among other canons such as the literary and artistic, and explores the peculiar combination of art and science that every historical operation entails. The conclusive section (‘Inescapability’) argues for the great paradox of the canon: the impossibility of conducting cultural and intellectual exchanges without it.