ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the contributions made by Italian authors to a theory of digression. The survey will be deliberately restricted to the employment of digression in the novel. The proliferation of digressions has two important consequences. First of all, it signals Pirandello's dissatisfaction with the naturalistic novel where the character, followed through his moral, sentimental, and cultural formation, is seen to be progressing towards a global and coherent construction of his personality. Secondly, breaking the sequence of the plot, digressions draw attention to the narrative process itself and to its main figures, narrator and reader. Alessandro Manzoni's historical novel has been considered the founding text in the tradition of the Italian novel. The chapter argues that the centrifugal power of digression was for the Sicilian writer not only the tool that he exploited in opening cracks within the structure of the nineteenth-century naturalist novel, but also what helped him to define the very nature of humour as 'dissection'.
