For those of us who love to read, finding a bargain book bin is akin to discovering our recently purchased property has loose gold on the surface and oil underneath. Bargain bins, however, are a crazy jumble. Gothic romance lies cheek by jowl with realism; horror rubs elbows with murder mystery. Yet readers have preferences, especially when it comes to genre. Amazingly, we can prowl the bargain bins, pick up a book, and in a matter of minutes determine if this particular item is something we're interested in reading. So, how exactly do we know this? Using what Mikhail Bahktin calls the "chronotope" in his four essays "Epic and Novel", "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse", "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel", and "Discourse in the Novel", this is the question this book hopes to answer. Anyone who reads, especially academics, will find this discussion helpful.