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

A history of the chapter from its origins in antiquity to today

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 & 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 & the segmentation of medieval romances, describing how the chapter took on new purpose when applied to narrative texts & how narrative segmentation gave rise to a host of aesthetic techniques. Dames shares engaging & in-depth readings of influential figures, from Sterne, Goethe, Tolstoy, & Dickens to George Eliot, Machado de Assis, B. S. Johnson, Agnès Varda, Uwe Johnson, Jennifer Egan, & László Krasznahorkai. He illuminates the sometimes tacit, sometimes dramatic ways in which the chapter became a kind of reckoning with time & a quiet but persistent feature of modernity.  

Ranging from ancient tablets and scrolls to contemporary fiction & film, The Chapter provides a compelling, elegantly written history of a familiar compositional mode that readers often take for granted & offers a new theory of how this versatile means of dividing narrative sculpts our experience of time.

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“[Dames] transforms the chapter into an extraordinarily revealing object of both literary analysis & cultural history. . . .” — Catherine Gallagher, Chronicle of Higher Education

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Nicholas Dames is the Theodore Kahan Professor of Humanities at Columbia University & an editor in chief of Public Books. He is the author of The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, & the Form of Victorian Fiction & Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, & British Fiction, 1810–1870.