Digressions in European Literature: From Cervantes to Sebald, edited by Dr Caragh Wells from the University’s Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies (together with Dr Alexis Grohmann from the University of Edinburgh), has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan.

The book explores digression in major works by fifteen European writers from the early modern period to the present day, with an emphasis on the twentieth century.

Studies of works by Miguel de Cervantes, Laurence Sterne, Charles Dickens, Charles Baudelaire, Henry James, Anton Chekhov, André Gide, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Robert Walser, Flann O'Brien, Samuel Beckett, Italo Calvino, Javier Marías and W. G. Sebald celebrate the variety of forms of digression and show it to be more than just a traditionally neglected rhetorical figure or literary technique. Digression emerges as a way of making the most of the potential of the freedom that narratives and the novel form can offer and of contemplating a world in which, as Henry James said, 'really, universally, relations stop nowhere'.

The book is available to order from Palgrave.