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.

Introduction to the Series. Preface. . Abbreviations. Transliteration and Translation. About the Contributors. 1. People Not of Our Time 2. Two of a Small Fraternity? Points of Contact and Departure in the Works of Bakhtin and Kagan up to 1924 3. The Nevel School of Philosophy (Bakhtin, Kagan and Pumpianskii) Between 1918 and 1925: Materials from Pumpianskii's Archive 4. The Author According to Bakhtin...and Bakhtin the Author 5. Carnival in Theory and Practice: Vaginov and Bakhtin 6. Author and Hero in Russian Literature of the Soviet Period 7. Bakhtin's Aesthetics as a Logic of Form 8. The Architecture of Aesthetic Discourse 9. Bakhtin and Valery: Towards a Poetic of Dialogism 10. We Are the Real : Bakhtin and Representation of Speech 11. Bakhtin's Concept of Chronotope : The Kantian Connection 12. Modernity and Chronotopicity in Bakhtin Modernity and Chronotopicity in Bakhtin 13. Is Dialogism for Real? 14. Chatter, Babble, and Dialogue.