Literature and literary criticism throughout the twentieth century are famous for their proclamations of the death of the author, the eclipse of character and the "nothingness of personality," as Borges put it. Walter Reed investigates the ideas of personhood developed by one of the most influential literary theorists of the last century: Mikhail Bakhtin. He finds in Bakhtin a personalism based on the idea of an ongoing dialogue between authors and their heroes in imaginative literature. Such a model of inter-personality, Reed argues, allows us to appreciate the rich possibilities of personhood set forth in the earlier nineteenth-century period of Romanticism. Elaborating a new general theory and providing close readings of classic works of Romantic poetry and fiction, Romantic Literature in Light of Bakhtin offers a better understanding of the preoccupation with the individual, creative self that lay at the heart of this revolutionary literature that still speaks to readers today.

Literature and literary criticism throughout the twentieth century are famous for their proclamations of the death of the author, the eclipse of character and the "nothingness of personality," as Borges put it. Walter Reed investigates the ideas of personhood developed by one of the most influential literary theorists of the last century: Mikhail Bakhtin. He finds in Bakhtin a personalism based on the idea of an ongoing dialogue between authors and their heroes in imaginative literature. Such a model of inter-personality, Reed argues, allows us to appreciate the rich possibilities of personhood set forth in the earlier nineteenth-century period of Romanticism. Elaborating a new general theory and providing close readings of classic works of Romantic poetry and fiction, Romantic Literature in Light of Bakhtin offers a better understanding of the preoccupation with the individual, creative self that lay at the heart of this revolutionary literature that still speaks to readers today.

The authors, eminent classicists and distinguished critics of Bakhtin, put Bakhtin into dialogue with the classics -- and classicists into dialogue with Bakhtin. Each essay offers a critical account of an important aspect of Bakhtin's thought and then examines the value of his approach in the context of a significant area of literary or cultural history. Beginning with an overview of Bakhtin's notion of carnival laughter, perhaps his central critical concept, the volume explores Bakhtin's thought and writing in relation to Homer's epic verse and Catullus's lyric poetry; ancient Roman novels; and Greek philosophy from Aristotle's theory of narrative to the work of Antiphon the Sophist.

In this book Paul Contino offers a theological study of Dostoevsky's final novel, The Brothers Karamazov. He argues that incarnational realism animates the vision of the novel, and the decisions and actions of its hero, Alyosha Fyodorovich Karamazov. The book takes a close look at Alyosha's mentor, the Elder Zosima, and the way his role as a confessor and his vision of responsibility "to all, for all" develops and influences Alyosha. The remainder of the study, which serves as a kind of reader's guide to the novel, follows Alyosha as he takes up the mantle of his elder, develops as a "monk in the world," and, at the end of three days, ascends in his vision of Cana. The study attends also to Alyosha's brothers and his ministry to them: Mitya's struggle to become a "new man" and Ivan's anguished groping toward responsibility. Finally, Contino traces Alyosha's generative role with the young people he encounters, and his final message of hope.

Although Mikhail Bakhtin's study of the novel does not focus in any systematic way on the role that translation plays in the processes of novelistic creation and dissemination, when he does broach the topic he grants translation'a disproportionately significant role in the emergence and constitution of literature. The contributors to this volume, from the US, Hong Kong, Finland, Japan, Spain, Italy, Bangladesh, and Belgium, bring their own polyphonic experiences with the theory and practice of translation to the discussion of Bakhtin's ideas about this topic, in order to illuminate their relevance to translation studies today. Broadly stated, the essays examine the art of translation as an exercise in a cultural re-accentuation (a transferal of the original text and its characters to the novel soil of a different language and culture, which inevitably leads to the proliferation of multivalent meanings), and to explore the various re-accentuation devices employed over the span of the last 100 years in translating modern texts from one language to another. Through its contributors, The Art of Translation in Light of Bakhtin's Re-accentuation brings together different cultural contexts and disciplines (such as literature, literary theory, the visual arts, pedagogy, translation studies, and philosophy) to demonstrate the continued international relevance of Bakhtin's ideas to the study of creative practices, broadly understood.

Since the mid-1980s, attempts to think history and literature together have produced much exciting work in the humanities. Indeed, some form of historicism can be said to inform most of the current scholarship in literary studies, including work in poetics, yet much of this scholarship remains undertheorized. Envisioning a revitalized and more expansive historicism, this volume builds on the tradition of Historical Poetics, pioneered by Alexander Veselovsky (1838–1906) and developed in various fruitful directions by the Russian Formalists, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Olga Freidenberg. The volume includes previously untranslated texts of some of the major scholars in this critical tradition, as well as original contributions which place that tradition in dialogue with other thinkers who have approached literature in a globally comparatist and evolutionary-historical spirit. The contributors seek to challenge and complement a historicism that stresses proximate sociopolitical contexts through an engagement with the longue durée of literary forms and institutions. In particular, Historical Poetics aims to uncover deep-historical stratifications and asynchronicities, in which formal solutions may display elective affinities with other, chronologically distant solutions to analogous social and political problems. By recovering the traditional nexus of philology and history, Persistent Forms seeks to reinvigorate poetics as a theoretical discipline that would respond to such critical and intellectual developments as Marxism, New Historicism, the study of world literature, practices of distant reading, and a renewed attention to ritual, oral poetics, and genre.

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.