After Bakhtin

David Lodge

"If the 1960s was the decade of structuralism, and the 1970s the decade of deconstruction, then the 1980s have been dominated by the discovery and dissemination of Mikhail Bakhtin's work. Now widely regarded as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, the Russian writer Mikhail Bakhtin was silenced by political censorship and persecution for most of his life. In 'After Bakhtin' David Lodge sketches Bakhtin's extraordinary career, and explores the relevance of his ideas on the dialogic nature of language, on the typology of fictional discourses and on the carnivalesque - to the writings of authors as diverse as George Eliot, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Elizabeth Gaskell, Jane Austen, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling and Lian Kundera - illustrative of the development of the novel in its classic, modernist and post-modernist phases. Two final essays reflect on the current state of academic criticism."--Publisher's summary.