Why did books start being divided into chapters? A new history

Post by esseph » Sun, Aug 31, 2025, 9:28 AM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #7

ldmosquera wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I hate about modern TV shows is that they have been further sliced into ~5-10min sequences between ad breaks, and even if you watch them without ads, you get narratively unnecessary cliff hangers just before a break, complete with dramatic music and a closeup of some dramatic gesture, trivially resolved in the next 5 seconds after the break. You're constantly yanked out of the narrative in service of ads ev…

I think you've got it backwards. That was the hallmark of old TV, on networks. Since the start of TV in the 50's. There are tons of modern TV shows that don't do anything you're talking about because they're made for streamers or paid TV without ads. It sounds like you watch different shows than I do, but I watch a lot of TV and haven't seen what you're talking about in many, many years. Not with Squid Game or Strang…

Post by watwut » Sun, Aug 31, 2025, 9:56 AM UTC

dotancohen wrote: post #27

esperent wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some grace for when it was written I reread it last year and I needed to give it a lot of grace, mostly from it's treatment of women. To Asimov's credit, there's no overt sexism - he manages to bypass that by having almost no female characters at all. There's a single female character who has no agency, every other character is white and male. I understand it's a product of it's time, and avoid judgment. However, t…

> there's no overt sexism - he manages to bypass that by having almost no female characters at all. That is true for much of classical literature, going all the way back to the Greeks.

Post by dotancohen » Sun, Aug 31, 2025, 10:24 AM UTC

watwut wrote: post #33

dotancohen wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's no overt sexism - he manages to bypass that by having almost no female characters at all. That is true for much of classical literature, going all the way back to the Greeks.

Female characters are not exactly exceptional in classical literature. And that statement includes fairly sexist works. Even Odyssey has multiple female characters - you do not get older then that. Shakespeare has them and that is as English language classic as it gets. Women are literally all around classics.

Post by watwut » Sun, Aug 31, 2025, 11:15 AM UTC

dotancohen wrote: post #35

watwut wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Female characters are not exactly exceptional in classical literature. And that statement includes fairly sexist works. Even Odyssey has multiple female characters - you do not get older then that. Shakespeare has them and that is as English language classic as it gets. Women are literally all around classics.

Yes, that's why I stated much classical literature. Not all classical literature or most classical literature. Much classical literature.

Post by k__ » Sun, Aug 31, 2025, 12:20 PM UTC

bdunks wrote: post #4

lqet wrote: post #2

> It was the Victorian novel that made the chapter seem natural. Key to the reality effects of nineteenth-century British fiction is its synchronisation of novel time with the natural rhythms of life. As a result, novelistic chapters lose their theatrics, their posturing and posing, even those unstable amalgamations surveyed in Equiano and Goethe, and instead become regular and ‘tacit’, receding into the background.…

I read Isaac Asimov’s foundation series a few years ago (side note for anyone who hasn’t read it: it still holds up incredibly well with a small suspension of disbelief and some grace for when it was written). In the preface to the 4th or 5th book (which were written 30+ years after the “original” trilogy) he discussed how the originals parts of the trilogy were published as a set of short stories in a SciFi publicat…