Digressions in European literature

This landmark collection of fifteen essays by a group of leading scholars is an original and wide-ranging exploration of digression in major works by fifteen of the finest European writers from the early modern period to the present day, with an emphasis on the twentieth century. Studies of works by Miguel de Cervantes, Laurence Sterne, Charles Dickens, Charles Baudelaire, Henry James, Anton Chekhov, Andř Gide, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Robert Walser, Flann O'Brien, Samuel Beckett, Italo Calvino, Javier Mar̕as and W.G. Sebald celebrate the variety of forms of digression and show it to be more than just a traditionally neglected rhetorical figure or literary technique: digression emerges as a way of making the most of the potential of the freeedom that narratives and the novel form can offer and of contemplating a world in which, as Henry James said, 'really, universally, relations stop nowhere'.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction, Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.