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Chapter (books)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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This article does not cite any references or sources. (November 2007) Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. |
A chapter is one of the main divisions of a piece of writing of relative length, such as a book. Chapters can be numbered in the case of such writings as law code (see Chapter 7 or Chapter 11) or they can be titled. For example, the first chapters of some well-known novels are titled:
- "The Boy Who Lived" – Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J. K. Rowling
- "Down the Rabbit-Hole" – Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
- "Into the Primitive" – The Call of the Wild, Jack London
- "Loomings" – Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
- "The Prison-Door" – The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
- "The Sound of the Shell" – Lord of the Flies, William G. Golding
In works of fiction, authors sometimes number their chapters eccentrically, often as a metafictional statement. For example:
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon only has chapters which are prime numbers.
- At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien has the first page titled Chapter 1, but has no further chapter divisions.
Many novels of great length do not have chapters. Non-fiction books, especially those used for reference, almost always have chapters for ease of navigation. In these works, chapters are often subdivided into sections. The chapters of reference works are almost always listed in a table of contents. Novels sometimes use a table of contents, but not always.
In ancient civilizations, books were often in the form of papyrus or parchment scrolls, which contained about the same amount of text as a typical chapter in a modern book. This is the reason chapters in recent reproductions and translations of works of these periods are often presented as "Book 1", "Book 2", etc.