A piece of practical criticism, this text is a comprehensive poetics of a genre that has not attracted a great deal of attention, at least not on this level. It is a reader’s and student’s guide that reaches beyond issues of individual texts and historical traditions to essential features of the form of the novel. There are a number of sophisticated books of this kind that deal with poetry, but because of the length of individual novels, perhaps, or because of the difficulty of formalizing the conventions of a genre that is always foregrounding its departure from tradition, most books on the rhetoric of fiction , the nature of narrative , or structuralist poetics that have broken important ground since the 1950s have been aimed at a scholarly, professorial audience, not at a readership of students, teachers of introductory courses, and that endangered species, the general reader.