Digressions in European Literature From Cervantes to Sebald [Hardcover]

With studies of, amongst others, Miguel de Cervantes, Anton Chekhov, Charles Baudelaire and Henry James, this landmark collection of essays is a unique and wide-ranging exploration and celebration of the many forms of digression in major works by fifteen of the finest European writers from the early modern period to the present day.Foreword; R.Chambers Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors Introduction? The Twists and Turns of Life: Cervantes's Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda ; J.Robbins Digressive and Progressive Movements: Sympathy and Sexuality in Tristram Shandy ; or, Plain Tales; J.Hawley Little Dorrit : Dickens, Circumlocution, Unconscious Thought; J.Tambling Concerning Metaphor, Digression and Rhyme (Fetish Aesthetics and the Walking Poem); R.Chambers Henry James, in Parenthesis; I.F.A.Bell A Slice of Watermelon: The Rhetoric of Digression in Chekhov's The Lady with the Dog ; P.J.Rabinowitz? & C.Bancroft 'Let's forget all I have just said': Diversions and Digressions in Gidean Narratives; D.Walker Errant Eyes: Digression, Metaphor and Desire in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time ; M.Topping Virginia Woolf and Digression: Adventures in Consciousness; L.Marcus ? Stealing the Story: Robert Walser's Robber -Novel; S.Frederick Negotiating Tradition: Flann O'Brien's Tales of Digression and Subversion; F.Coulouma 'Going On': Digression and Consciousness in The Beckett Trilogy ; E.J.Smyth Straight Line or Aimless Wandering? Italo Calvino's Way to Digression; O.Santovetti Roving with a Compass; Digression, the Novel and the Creative Imagination in Javier Mar?as; A.Grohmann The Sense of Sebald's Endings...and Beginnings; J.J.Long Index

'Digressions is a collection that works on two levels. As a collection of individual essays it provides much that will interest, while as an extended meditation on digression it offers a collection of material that is hugely suggestive, if not conclusive, and which invites the reader into a pleasantly open-ended and willsK