If a book about the history of chaptering literary works wasn’t enough to draw me in, this write-up in the Sydney Review of Books sold me:
One of the basic structures of the book, the chapter is a ‘box of time’ that shapes the reader’s experience of temporality. As such, changes in chaptering present one way of exploring changes in the experience of time in literary history. How did time feel in late antiquity, or in fifteenth-century Burgundy, or to a former slave at the end of the eighteenth century? Studying the chapter might also tell us something about our experience of time now, in ‘the present’ – whatever that is – and the historical distance between our time and that of times past.
Borrowing from the library now.