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

In literary studies, the interest in the chapter as a literary form or device is not totally new, but this book—this impressive and admirable book— breaks new ground with the depth of its historical, as well as generic, scope and the profundity of its thinking on the cultural meaning of capitulation: a textual feature or compositional technique whose very ubiquity seems to make it almost invisible. Although Nicholas Dames explicitly builds on the well-institutionalized Francophone research on this topic (see the pioneering publication by Ugo Dionne, La Voie aux chapitres [2008] and the ANR funded collective program “chapitres”) [1], his main objectives are neither taxonomic (as in Dionne, whose work remains in line with the classic structuralist take on literary studies) nor case or genre studies oriented (as in the ANR project, which prioritizes more recent practices of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries). Granted, Dames is an equally...