This volume brings together nine essays by established and new scholars from Russia, Britain and North America to explore the historical contexts and current relevance of the work of the Bakhtin Circle for social theory, philosophy, history and linguistics.

The Russian philosopher and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin has traditionally been seen as the leading figure in the group of intellectuals known as the Bakhtin Circle. The writings of other members of the Circle are considered much less important than his work, while Bakhtin's achievement has been exaggerated in proportion to the downgrading of the thinkers with whom he associated in the 1920s. This volume, which includes new translations and studies of the work of the most important members of the Circle, sets out to correct the distortions in the established representations of its activity. The original contributions to literary and linguistic theory made by Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev (but frequently credited to Bakhtin) are assessed, and the distinctiveness of their approaches is highlighted.

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975) has become a name to conjure with. We know this because he is now one of those thinkers everyone already knows-without necessarily having to read much of him! Doesn't everyone now know how polyphony functions, what carnival means, why language is dialogic but the novel more so, how chronotopes make possible any concrete artistic cognition and that utterances give rise to genres that last thousands of years, always the same but not the same? Like Marx and Freud in the twentieth century, or Plotinus and Plato in the fourth, a familiarity with Bakhtin's thinking is so commonly assumed, at least in the Humanities, as to be taken for granted. He is no longer an author but a field of study in his own right. As Craig Brandist (of the Bakhtin Centre at Sheffield University) reports: the works of the [Bakhtin] Circle are still appearing in Russian and English, and are already large in number...There are now several thousand works about the Bakhtin Circle.The freedom given to contributors to address any text or topic under the general rubric of The Bakhtin Circle and Ancient Narrative has produced a remarkable variety of essays ranging widely over different periods, genres, and cultures. While most of the contributors chose to explore Bakhtin's theory of genre or to take issue with his account of one genre, Greek romance, the remaining contributions defy such convenient categories. What all the essays share with one another (and those collected in Bakhtin and the Classics) is the attempt to engage Bakhtin as a reader and thinker.

The group of intellectuals that surrounded literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin has come to be known as the Bakhtin Circle and have come to be quite influential in the field of cultural criticism. Brandist (Bakhtin Centre, Sheffield U., UK) examines the sources of their thinking, arguing that they were significantly less innovative in thought than many might suppose. He characterizes the Circle's contribution as an ongoing engagement with several intellectual traditions, attempting to put that engagement into the context of the social and political circumstances surrounding them. Distributed by Stylus Publishing. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

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.

In this multi-disciplinary volume, comprising the work of several established scholars from different countries, central concepts associated with the work of the Bakhtin Circle are interrogated in relation to intellectual history, language theory and an understanding of new media. The book will prove an important resource for those interested in the ideas of the Bakhtin Circle, but also for those attempting to develop a coherent theoretical approach to language in use and problems of meaning production in new media.