Includes references.

This volume is a critical introduction to the life and works of Mikhail Bakhtin and his theorectical oeuvre. It outlines his major ideas such as dialogism, the dialogic imagination, heteroglossia, polyphony, carnival, chronotope and answerability, and their continued relevance in contemporary studies in literature and culture studies, and folk and popular cultures. Mikhail Bakhtin analyses the therorist's major contributions to literary criticism and the study of the novelistic genre, and examines Bakhtin's legacy for the humanities as a whole. The volume is a nuanced study of the ethical perspective in Bakhtin's work that locates literature at the intersection of various disciplines such as philosophy, sociology and political science