In the landscape of the early modern European comic novel the inn often features as a monument to digression - the perfect setting for chance encounters with strangers who always have a story to tell. This wide-ranging comparative study explores the special part played by the inn, tracing the progress of a succession of wayward heroes and narrators in five canonical texts: Cervantes's Don Quijote, Scarron's Roman comique, Fielding's Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Diderot's Jacques le fataliste. As this celebration of digressive fiction unfolds, a very different...