digression

digression, episode, excursus, divagation are comparable when they denote a departure from the main course of development, especially of a narrative, a drama, or an exposition.

Digression applies to a deviation, especially if at the expense of unity of effect, from the main subject of a discourse; it may or may not suggest intention or design

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in this long digression which I was accidentally led into— Sterne

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a word of digression may be pardoned, however, for the two subjects are allied— Cardozo

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Episode (see also OCCURRENCE) usually applies to an incidental narrative which, though separable from the main subject, arises naturally from it; sometimes an episode is definitely a purposeful digression (as for giving variety to the narration, heightening the illusion of reality, or elucidating a motive); thus, in Paradise Lost Raphael's account of the war in heaven is in this sense an episode because it breaks the chronological order of the poem and reverts to events which occurred prior to those told in the first book

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descriptive poetry . . . may be interspersed with dramatic episodes— Alexandery

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Episode is used not only of a literary work but of other art forms or of life in reference to something that seems apart from the main subject or course of a thing

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delight in the virginal beauty of fresh blossoms, in the dewy green of water-meadows ... is evident in numberless pictures of the earlier schools of Europe; but there these amenities of nature are but an episode— Binyon

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Miss Dix's biographer . . . considers her war work an episode, not equal in quality to her life work— Baker

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Excursus applies to an avowed and usually formal digression elucidating at some length an incidental point

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this started an ethnological excursus on swineherds, and drew from Pinecoffin long tables showing the proportion per thousand of the caste in the Derajat— Kipling

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Divagation is often used in preference to digression when aimless wandering from the main course or inattentiveness to logic is implied

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Froissart's style of poetry invites the widest . . . liberty of divagation, of dragging in anything that really interested him— Saintsbury

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the author of it would need to keep an extremely clear head, reject stuffing and divagation— Swinnerton

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