"Axelrod's The Poetics of Novels deals with the fundamentals of novel-writing and the execution of such, and though it engages specific notions of literary and cultural theory, it privileges the architectonics of the texts themselves as it crosses boundaries of both time and culture in dealing with novels as diverse as Cervantes' Don Quixote, Clarice Lispector's Hour of the Star and Samuel Beckett's Company."--BOOK JACKET.