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.