"The first of its kind for medieval studies. . . . I cannot imagine that a collection of this caliber would not be consulted regularly by those of us who struggle with questions of interpreting and teaching the literature of the Middle Ages."--R. A. Shoaf, University of Florida This is the first wide-ranging exploration of the theories of the 20th-century Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, as they apply to medieval literature. It challenges established ways of reading medieval texts and constructs a cross-interrogation between medieval data and Bakhtinian theories. Contents Part One: Carnival Voices in Medieval Texts Playing on the Margins: Bakhtin and the Smithfield Decretals, by Andrew Taylor Taking Laughter Seriously: The Comic and Didactic Functions of Helmbrecht, by Lisa R. Perfetti Dangerous Dialogues: The Sottie as a Threat to Authority, by Jody L. H. McQuillan Part Two: Multiple Voices in Medieval Texts Heteroglossia and Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, by Robert M. Jordan Dialogics and Prosody in Chaucer, by Steve Guthrie Dialogism, Heteroglossia, and Late Medieval Translation, by Daniel J. Pinti Medieval Authorship and the Polyphonic Text: From Manuscript Commentary to the Modern Novel, by Robert S. Sturges Part Three: Dissenting Voices in Dialogue with Bakhtin The Chronotopes of Monology in Chaucer's Clerk's Tale, by Thomas J. Farrell Popular-Festive Forms and Beliefs in Robert Mannyng's Handlyng Synne, by Nancy Mason Bradbury Problems of Bakhtin's Epic: Capitalism and the Image of History, by Mark A. Sherman Thomas J. Farrell is associate professor and chair of the English Department at Stetson University, DeLand, Florida, where he holds the Kenneth P. Kirchman Chair in the Humanities. He has published articles in ELH, Studies in Philology, Chaucer Review, and other collections and journals.

David Lawton approaches later medieval English vernacular culture in terms of voice. As texts and discourses shift in translation and in use from one language to another, antecedent texts are revoiced in ways that recreate them (as "public interiorities") without effacing their history or future. The approach yields important insights into the voice work of late medieval poets, especially Langland and Chaucer, and also their fifteenth-century successors, who treat their work as they have treated their precursors. It also helps illuminate vernacular religious writing and its aspirations, and it addresses literary and cultural change, such as the effect of censorship and increasing political instability in and beyond the fifteenth century. Lawton also proposes his emphasis on voice as a literary tool of broad application, and his book has a bold and comparative sweep that encompasses the Pauline letters, Augustine's Confessions, the classical precedents of Virgil and Ovid, medieval contemporaries like Machaut and Petrarch, extra-literary artists like Monteverdi, later poets such as Wordsworth, Heaney, and Paul Valery, and moderns such as Jarry and Proust. What justifies such parallels, the author claims, is that late medieval texts constitute the foundation of a literary history of voice that extends to modernity. The book's energy is therefore devoted to the transformative reading of later medieval texts, in order to show their original and ongoing importance as voice work.

As witnessed by a tremendous upsurge in medieval research, academic meetings, innovative interpretive approaches, enrolment numbers, and public interest, Medieval Studies are proving once again to be a vibrant field of investigations both inside and outside of academia. Nevertheless, there is a tendency among colleagues and administrators in the field of Germanistik/German Studies to exclude the earlier period as an exotic and irrelevant subject matter. The contributors to this volume, all of whom teach at North American universities, make a strong case for the paradigmatic function of medieval German literature for the general field of Germanistik, and argue that many of the most recent changes in our discipline related to the German Studies paradigm have been foreshadowed by Medieval Studies where interdisciplinarity, comparative approaches, the consideration of Mentalitätsgeschichte, theology, history, art history, even gender studies, and the history of everyday life have often constituted the conditio sine qua non. Some of the authors in this volume argue for the relevance of medieval German literature by investigating concrete cases taken from the Middle Ages, others show how modern German literature has been deeply influenced by medieval texts. The purpose of this volume is not to privilege medieval literature over modern literature, but instead to reclaim the premodern period as an important and relevant field of investigation within contemporary German Studies.

This is the first in a new series entitled MHRA Bibliographies. The Annotated Bakhtin Bibliography draws its material from, and is intended as a companion to, the on-line Analytical Database of Work by and about the Bakhtin Circle: maintained by the Bakhtin Centre at the University of Sheffield, this is the most extensive electronic collection of bibliographical and analytical data relating to the Russian philosopher and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin and the members of the Bakhtin Circle (principally Mariia Iudina, Matvei Kagan, Pavel Medvedev, Lev Pumpianskii, Ivan Sollertinskii and Valentin Voloshinov). The work of Bakhtin and the Bakhtin Circle has had enormous international impact across a range of disciplines, including literary and cultural theory, philosophy, history, anthropology, linguistics and psychology. The Annotated Bakhtin Bibliography will provide scholars and students of Bakhtin with easy access to detailed information on research undertaken throughout the world in these and other fields. The text of The Annotated Bakhtin Bibliography is in two parts. The first part comprises extensive bibliographical details of almost three hundred primary works (including information about translations and reprints). The second consists of almost one thousand entries containing analytical and annotated information about secondary literature dealing with Bakhtin and the Bakhtin Circle in over twenty languages, allowing the principal trends in the development of Bakhtin studies to be discerned and traced. Consultation of the bibliography is facilitated by comprehensive name, title and subject indexes.

This book explores the origins of American literary deconstruction in the light of the work of Russian philosopher Mikhail M. Bakhtin. To do so, the author offers a comparative reading of Bakhtin’s work and that of the literary critics who formed the so-called Yale School of Deconstruction: namely, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Harold Bloom, and Geoffrey Hartman. By resorting to Bakhtin’s challenging understanding of the dialogical nature of the world and his reworking of the notion of temporality in the literary work of art, the readings offered in this book provide the reader with a new point of departure for one of the most influential movements in twentieth century literary theory: literary deconstruction.

"Using Mikhail Bakhtin as a kind of theoretical starting point, this volume of essays investigates the manifestation of such competing "voices" within the tradition of lyric poetry. The lyric subject's understanding of himself/herself - through the very act of speaking/writing - is irrevocably connected, on multiple levels, to the heard and unheard voices of others. No matter how private the voice of the lyric speaker appears to be, nearly every utterance is formed from and then positioned between what others have said or will say. Included here are essays on the classical, medieval, early modern, and modern lyric. Some of the essays in this volume engage Bakhtin "head-on"; others, by focusing explicitly on the construction of the subject through multiple discursive dialogues implicitly bring Bakhtin to bear. These essays engage multiple elements of dialogism, including the convergence of masculine and feminine voices, public and private discourses, intertextuality and the "voices of the past," the dialogue between literature and art, and the always present dialogue between speaker(s) and reader(s)."--BOOK JACKET.