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

Post by beAbU » Sun, Aug 31, 2025, 4:08 PM UTC

ldmosquera wrote: post #3

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.…

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…

Post by jacquesm » Sun, Aug 31, 2025, 4:51 PM UTC

esperent wrote: post #23

bdunks wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

Post by k__ » Sun, Aug 31, 2025, 7:48 PM UTC

beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #41

k__ wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"it still holds up incredibly well" Can't confirm. I couldn't get through the first 100 pages.

The ideas in it are fascinating (if also dated). The characters, though, are insanely 1 dimensional. It's very obviously a 1 micron thin story layered over the scaffold of ideas. After looking at it that way, I could get through the series without groaning or laughing a lot.

Post by alejohausner » Sun, Aug 31, 2025, 8:19 PM UTC

Post by aspenmayer » Mon, Sep 01, 2025, 6:36 AM UTC

madaxe_again wrote: post #28

dotancohen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not learn writing formally, and I do not publish what I write. But I do write a lot, mostly fiction to express the things that happen to myself in a controlled environment. I tried not writing in chapters, but I find that the chapters helped me compartmentalize different times and places and specific subjects. It may be that I'm simply used to chapters from reading other books, but no matter what the book I fin…

If you eschew chapters, it can have a pretty distinctive effect on your prose. Prominent examples that come to mind are Finnegan’s Wake, The Waves, and On The Road, and all make for an intense read. The absence of pause gives you no place to put it down, you are ensnared within the inescapable flow. Seems to fit stream of consciousness stuff better. Although this does remind me of sitting on a plane as a kid with fin…