Dames Nicholas. The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century

Princeton University Press, 2023. — 385 p. — ISBN 978-0-691-25363-3.Why do books have chapters? With this seemingly simple question, Nicholas Dames embarks on a literary journey spanning two millennia, revealing how an ancient editorial technique became a universally recognized component of narrative art and a means to register the sensation of time.Dames begins with the textual compilations of the Roman world, where chapters evolved as a tool to organize information. He goes on to discuss the earliest divisional systems of the Gospels and the segmentation of medieval romances, describing how the chapter took on new purpose when applied to narrative texts and how narrative segmentation gave rise to a host of aesthetic techniques. Dames shares engaging and in-depth readings of influential figures, from Sterne, Goethe, Tolstoy, and Dickens to George Eliot, Machado de Assis, B. S. Johnson, Agnès Varda, Uwe Johnson, Jennifer Egan, and László Krasznahorkai. He illuminates the sometimes tacit, sometimes dramatic ways in which the chapter became a kind of reckoning with time and a quiet but persistent feature of modernity.Ranging from ancient tablets and scrolls to contemporary fiction and film, The Chapter provides a compelling, elegantly written history of a familiar compositional mode that readers often take for granted and offers a new theory of how this versatile means of dividing narrative sculpts our experience of time.Envisioning the Chapter
Ante Chapter: On Segmented Time
In Which an Object Is Proposed for Analysis
Two Millennia of Capitulation, from Heading to Unit
On the Shape of the Classical Heading (the Threshold) - Tabula Bembina—Augustine—Arrian’s Epictetus
Concerning the Division of the Gospels (the Abstract Syncopation) Eusebius—Alexandrinus—the Paris Bible
How Fifteenth-Century Remediators Did Their Work (the Cut, the Fade) The Burgundian Chrétien de Troyes—Caxton’s Malory
Dividing Time in, and Beyond, The Novel
Attitudes of the Early Novel Chapter (the Postural, the Elongated) Locke—Sterne—Equiano—Goethe
The Repertoire of the Chapter circa 1865 (the Tacit) Tolstoy—Gaskell
The Days of Our Novelistic Lives (the Circadian) Dickens—Eliot—McGregor
The Poignancy of Sequence (the Antique-Diminutive) Machado—B. S. Johnson—Varda
Post Chapter: The Future of a Convention (1970–) - Uwe Johnson—Egan—Krasznahorkai