Digression: A Narrative Strategy in the Italian Novel

‘Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; – they are the life, the soul of reading’. So declared Laurence Sterne in his Tristram Shandy, the greatest of all monuments to digression. The modern Italian novel was not slow to pick up on Sterne’s lesson. This book examines the workings of digression in the novels of five major Italian authors – Manzoni, Dossi, Pirandello, Gadda, and Calvino – from the birth of the modern novel in the early 19th century to the era of postmodernist experimen...