Contexts of Bakhtin

The fourteen essays collected in this volume notwithstanding their diversity of subject matter and approach share a concern with the contexts to which we need to refer in order to understand not only the origins but also the potential of Mikhail Bakhtin's thought: contexts both immediate and oblique personal and impersonal intellectual and theoretical. Five of the essays are by well-known Russian scholars whose work on Bakhtin has not previously been translated in English; the other nine papers are by established and emerging Bakhtin specialists in North America the United Kingdom and Europe.