Bakhtin 1984b is Bakhtin’s sustained examination of carnival and the carnivalesque. Bakhtin 1984a focuses on voice and dialogic relations between authors and character in the work of Dostoevsky. In the final essay, he discusses literature and language in general, which he sees as stratified, constantly changing systems of subgenres, dialects, and fragmented "languages" in battle with one another. Bakhtin 1981 explores the notions of dialogicality, heteroglossia, and chronotope, and has been particularly important in anthropology. For him, the novel is not so much a genre as it is a force, "novelness," which he discusses in "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse." Two essays, "Epic and Novel" and "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," deal with literary history in Bakhtin's own unorthodox way. Bakhtin uses the category "novel" in a highly idiosyncratic way, claiming for it vastly larger territory than has been traditionally accepted. The volume also contains a lengthy introduction to Bakhtin and his thought and a glossary of terminology. The Dialogic Imagination presents, in superb English translation, four selections from Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Problems of literature and esthetics), published in Moscow in 1975. These essays reveal Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975)-known in the West largely through his studies of Rabelais and Dostoevsky-as a philosopher of language, a cultural historian, and a major theoretician of the novel.
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