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. 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. The volume also contains a lengthy introduction to Bakhtin and his thought and a glossary of terminology. Bakhtin uses the category "novel" in a highly idiosyncratic way, claiming for it vastly larger territory than has been traditionally accepted. 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. 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.

During the last 30 years, the Russian thinker M. M. Bakhtin has achieved great international recognition for his work with - among other subjects - literary theory and philosophy of language, and inspiration from his research is to be seen in almost all fields of the human sciences. However, Bakhtin's authorship focused primarily on one particular phenomenon: the novel. In this book, the world's leading Bakhtin scholars discuss Bakhtin's special understanding of the novel, both in relation to the status the novel occupies in the existing theoretical and philosophical debate, and in the historical context in which it was created. Articles such as Michael Holquist's Why is God's Name a Pun - Bakhtin's Theory of the Novel and Theo-Philology and Derek Littlewood's Epic and Novel in Magic Realism have been revised and augmented for the publication.

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.

Martin Flanagan uses Bakhtin's notions of dialogism, chronotope and polyphony to address fundamental questions about film form and reception, focussing particularly on the way cinematic narrative utilises time and space in its very construction.

Urwind comprises fifty-three letters from Daniel Urwind, an aging bookseller, to his wife, who has left him for an indeterminate spell of greater freedom and study in the United States. The wife's absence haunts the letters, which are often tales of Daniel's daily rituals. Yet Daniel's narration of such mundanities--changing the bookshop window dressing, or housekeeping--approaches magical realism; memories of his wife, fantasies, bad dreams, monologues, and dialogues with the living and the dead coalesce in a complex layering of experience, past and present. Urwind is a construct worthy of Bachelard's Poetics of Space, and a painful chronicle of the ending of a love.

First published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This anthology provides a comprehensive selection of the writing by Bakhtin and of that attributed to Voloshinov and Medvedev. It introduces readers to the aspects most relevant to literary and cultural studies and gives a focused sense of Bakhtin's central ideas and the underlying cohesiveness of his thinking.