My two lectures offer a brief introduction to and overview of approaches to the technically-informed academic discussion of the novel as a literary form and address such questions as the varieties of narrating persona, narrative sequence, time, represented place, cultural coding, as well as ethical and political approaches to subject and theme. The brief lectures refer to a very wide array of critics and theorists of the novel including Mikhail Bakhtin, Wolfgang Iser, Gerard Genette, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze and to a large number of fictional examples including Defoe, Sterne and Dickens, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, Bran Stoker, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Gustave Flaubert, Julio Cortazar, B.S. Johnson, J.G. Ballard, Kazuo Ishiguro, Martin Amis and Graham Swift.