A comprehensive history of an understudied element of literature.
The origins of the modern book chapter.
Dames, a professor of humanities at Columbia and author of The Physiology of the Novel, acknowledges that “the chapter” might strike some as a boring topic. Writing about something so “embarrassingly common, the musty old furniture of the book,” runs the risk of sounding pedantic. However, Dames shows exactly why chapters are worth our attention. Though they often sit below the threshold of our notice, they shape our thinking about time and transition. The author offers a pleasing investigation of why they exist and “what…they [do] to our sense of time. He analyzes segmentation decisions made over the course of history by the various agents—authors, scribes, printers, editors—involved in making books. He finds that the function of the chapter has shifted over the millennia, from antiquity to the present. What began as a tool for facilitating discontinuous access to information became, by the early modern period, a tool for experimenting with temporal matters. “The art of the chapter” becomes “necessarily an art of poignancy,” as the modern narrative chapter represents, in a variety of ways, the passage of time. The author’s case studies are diverse, and his analyses are rich. He shows how 15th-century editors used chapter breaks to “insert a feeling of presentness” and linger on “swiftly passing gestures.” He describes the case of an 18th-century abolitionist, formerly enslaved, who wrote an autobiography in which each chapter “speaks of a time structure that is not one’s own”—“an inhabited or endured…time.” In the 19th century, novelists often blended their chapter breaks into the diurnal rhythms of the day. Bringing us up to the present, Dames explores how the old convention of the chapter looks “too rote…to pulse with reality” and yet still endures, continuing to organize our books and our understanding of our lives.
A comprehensive history of an understudied element of literature.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780691135199
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.
The Nobel laureate’s singular aesthetics.
Award-winning novelist, essayist, and literary scholar Serpell offers a compelling elucidation of Toni Morrison’s notably challenging fiction, criticism, plays, and poetry. “There are passages in Morrison’s works,” she has found, “that no reader I’ve ever met understands on the first go.” The source of Morrison’s “famed difficulty,” as Serpell sees it, was not “her intersectional identity, her prickly personality, or her contrarian politics,” but rather her complicated and sophisticated understanding of Black aesthetics. Serpell’s subtle textual analysis of 11 novels, “Recitatif”—Morrison’s only published short story—and several essays, plays, and poems is enriched by her prodigious literary background and insights she has gleaned from archival sources: letters, diary entries, notes, and manuscripts. Morrison, she asserts, “refused for her work to be reduced to her race and her gender, or to be forced to fit the expectations foisted upon her as a result.” Tar Baby (1981), Morrison’s fourth novel, seems to Serpell the first time in the writer’s career that she “directly addressed the white/black dichotomy” with characters who “are avatars for race.” Serpell gives extensive attention to “Recitatif,” a story in which “all racial codes” are vanished, yet one in which “racial identity is crucial” to its characters. The story emerges as “a kind of asymmetrical, contrapuntal, alternative dialogue” between its two female protagonists, “between an individual voice and the instruments of the social world, or between the reader’s experience and the story’s unresolved chords—or codes.” Celebrating Morrison’s “masterful difficulty and superb wit,” “her inscrutable yet perfect metaphors,” and “her unaccountable rushes of imagination,” Serpell affords ample evidence that she was “a writer whose deliberate difficulty—personal, political, and literary—defied classification…and made for brilliance.”
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780593732915
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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