Holquist's masterly study draws on all of Bakhtin's known writings providing a comprehensive account of his achievement. Widely acknowledged as an exceptional guide to Bakhtin and dialogics, this book now includes a new introduction, concluding chapter and a fully updated bibliography. He argues that Bakhtin's work gains coherence through his commitment to the concept of dialogue, examining Bakhtin's dialogues with theorists such as Saussure, Freud, Marx and Lukacs, as well as other thinkers whose connection with Bakhtin has previously been ignored. Dialogism also includes dialogic readings of major literary texts, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Gogol's The Notes of a Madman and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, which provide another dimension of dialogue with dialogue.

Michael Holquist's masterly study draws on all of Bakhtin's known writings, providing a comprehensive account of his achievement. This edition includes a new introduction, concluding chapter and a fully updated bibliography.

This study portrays how Louise Erdrich’s writing extends Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogism and the novel through an investigation of a selection of her works, as well as her practices of writing, co-writing, re-writing, and reading novels. Erdrich’s hallmark dialogic literary style and practice encompasses writing a series of books; re-cycling protagonists, narrators, events, themes and settings; re-writing previously published novels; employing heteroglossia and polyglossia; co-authoring texts, blogging about books; translating different epistemologies for different audiences; and spotlighting families as the main thematic concern in dialogue with her own parenting experiences as depicted in her memoirs. She writes a growing series of novels, compost pile-like, capitalizing on former novels, as well as adding new elements and new stories in the process. Thus, a dialogic intra-textual microcosm emerges. Erdrich suffuses her writing with an incessant quality of changing and becoming. Her novels resist closure, while protagonists return and demand attention, and the author answers dialogically by penning new tales. Erdrich’s writing can be accessed because it concerns shared human experiences and relationships, both their ambivalence and their beauty. Erdrich includes instead of alienating, sympathizes instead of judging, which makes her an internationally acclaimed author, with her work crossing topographies, epistemologies, and identities.

The last half of the twentieth century has seen the emergence of literary theory as a new discipline. As with any body of scholarship, various schools of thought exist, and sometimes conflict, within it. I.R. Makaryk has compiled a welcome guide to the field. Accessible and jargon-free, the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory provides lucid, concise explanations of myriad approaches to literature that have arisen over the past forty years. Some 170 scholars from around the world have contributed their expertise to this volume. Their work is organized into three parts. In Part I, forty evaluative essays examine the historical and cultural context out of which new schools of and approaches to literature arose. The essays also discuss the uses and limitations of the various schools, and the key issues they address. Part II focuses on individual theorists. It provides a more detailed picture of the network of scholars not always easily pigeonholed into the categories of Part I. This second section analyses the individual achievements, as well as the influence, of specific scholars, and places them in a larger critical context. Part III deals with the vocabulary of literary theory. It identifies significant, complex terms, places them in context, and explains their origins and use. Accessibility is a key feature of the work. By avoiding jargon, providing mini-bibliographies, and cross-referencing throughout, Makaryk has provided an indispensable tool for literary theorists and historians and for all scholars and students of contemporary criticism and culture.

‘Bakhtin and his Others’ aims to develop an understanding of Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas through a contextual approach, particularly with a focus on Bakhtin studies from the 1990s onward. The volume offers fresh theoretical insights into Bakhtin’s ideas on (inter)subjectivity and temporality – including his concepts of chronotope and literary polyphony – by reconsidering his ideas in relation to the sources he employs, and taking into account later research on similar topics. The case studies show how Bakhtin's ideas, when seen in light of this approach, can be constructively employed in contemporary literary research.

Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic assembles thirteen essays on the intersection of Bakhtin's narrative theory, especially his concept of dialogism. The book explores the dimensions of using Bakhtin for a feminist analysis and discerns the connections between feminist dialogics and cultural materialism. The authors offer various views ranging from studies of ecofeminism, gender theories of novelistic discourse, Bakhtin and French feminism, to analyses of contemporary novelists such as Toni Morrison, Nadine Gordimer, and Pat Barker. Drawing on Bakhtin's sociolinguistics, this book provides an introduction to feminist work on Bakhtin and the development of a cultural politics of reading. Challenging questions are raised: What is dialogic feminism? Can Bakhtin's theories advance a feminist politics? How does a feminist dialogics fit into a materialist feminist practice? Can the "dialogic imagination" also describe some of the most radical moments within feminist thinking? The interdisciplinary focus of these responses represents the ongoing dialogue among literary critics, cultural theorists, and feminists.

Bakhtin and Voloshinov argued that dialogue is the intersubjective basis of consciousness, and of the creativity which makes historical changes in consciousness possible. The multiple dialogical relationships give every subject, who has developed through internalising them, the potential to distance him or herself from them. Consciousness is therefore an “unfinalised” process, always open to a possible future which would not merely reiterate the past. But this book explores its corollary: The relative openness is a field of conflict where rival discourses struggle for hegemony, by subordinating or eliminating their rivals. That is how the unconscious is created out of socio-historical conflicts. Hegemony is always incomplete, because there is always the possibility of a return of its repressed rivals in new combinations.