“The Chapter is that rare thing: a scholar’s book that is at once learned and delightful. Nicholas Dames has written a supple, elegant, unfussy, and wide-ranging history of how the curious practice of dividing prose into its component parts has taught readers to experience the flow of time. From The Chapter and its many masterful theories of narrative measurement, we learn what it is to wait, to hope, to search, to find; to pause, to rest, to breathe.”—Merve Emre, Wesleyan University, contributing writer at The New Yorker“The Chapter is one of those books whose confidence and sweep—from classical and scholastic literature through to the modern avant-garde—is thrilling. Dames’s elegant close readings are a continual delight, showing how our sense of suspense, or transition, or the containment of time, or of the Jamesian scene, may derive not from the text itself but from its scrupulous segmentation. Under Dames’s careful eye, the chapter is revealed to be a venerable and singularly adaptable literary device, the Swiss Army knife of Western narrative.”—Dennis Duncan, author of Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age“This is the masterwork we did not know we needed, on a topic easy to overlook. What Scott McCloud did for the gutter in comics, Nicholas Dames has done for an equally vital, equally unobtrusive sort of textual pause. Dames’s prose is lucid and elegant while his brilliantly chosen examples are legion without being overwhelming. I will never turn from one chapter to the next in the same way again.”—John Plotz, author of Semi-Detached“The chapter is one of those topics that remain invisible precisely because they lie in plain sight. Tracing the evolution of a citational device for scholars and an editorial device for sacred texts into a compositional unit for novelists, Dames raises questions so fundamental that they have either flown under the radar or, in their vastness and ubiquity, scared other scholars away. The Chapter dares a chronological and generic sweep more reminiscent of an Auerbach than of any recent critic or theorist, but never at the expense of granularity.”—Leah Price, author of What We Talk about When We Talk about Books