'Elements of Literature' is designed to introduce students and researchers to the structural and methodological principles underpinning the main branches of literary study. Incorporating the very latest scholarship on issues of form and genre, the series offers exciting new perspectives that will further our understanding of how literature operates within its cultural context.

The English Novel and Prose Narrative provides an astute, wide-ranging and accessible critical introduction to the English novel and short fiction, and explores the novel's relations to narrative forms such as biography and autobiography. David Amigoni expertly guides readers in methods of narrative analysis and close reading, while stressing the need to place narratives and narrative theories in historical and cultural context. To this end, he traces critical debate about the origins of the novel, domestic realism and romance, the bildungsroman, journalism and mass culture, the experimental novel, postmodernism and postcolonialism.

Adopting a case-study approach, the author provides theoretically informed readings of Pamell Tristram Shandy, Emma, Jane Eyre, The Mill on the Floss, Bleak House, The Spoils of Poynton, M Dalloway and Midnight's Children as well as short stories by Thomas Hardy and Katheri Mansfield. While primarily an introductory guide, the book also offers a distinct approach to history of novel criticism that will engage readers interested in the genre at all levels.