'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 experimentation. Digression is shown to play a role in defining not only the poetics of the five authors, but also their underlying world-views, their cognitive and philosophical dispositions. The book explores the tensions digression engenders in narrative texts, by creating extra time within narration, disrupting the readers' expectations, and generating an act of reflection upon the narrative process itself. What emerges is a sense of the vitality and flexibility of the device of digression in the Italian tradition, both within the canonical novel and the anti-novel, as well as an illuminating and original web of relations between the five authors under analysis. ¿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 experimentation. Digression is shown to play a role in defining not only the poetics of the five authors, but also their underlying world-views, their cognitive and philosophical dispositions. The book explores the tensions digression engenders in narrative texts, by creating extra time within narration, disrupting the readers¿ expectations, and generating an act of reflection upon the narrative process itself. What emerges is a sense of the vitality and flexibility of the device of digression in the Italian tradition, both within the canonical novel and the anti-novel, as well as an illuminating and original web of relations between the five authors under analysis. Acknowledgements 9 Abbreviations 11 Charter 1 Introduction 13 Chapter 2 Alessandro Manzoni and the Art of Digression 29 Chapter 3 'Il lettore mutatosi in collaboratore': the Importance of the Reader in Dossi's Digressive Texts 69 Chapter 4 Digressive Art as Humorous Art? Luigi Pirandello's Lino, nessuno e centomila 101 Chapter 5 Ramified Plots: Carlo Emilio Gadda's Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana 133 Chapter 6 Italo Calvino and the Metamorphoses of the Plot 187 Chapter 7 Conclusion 233 Bibliography 241 Index 253