Mikhail Bakhtin is one of the 20th century's most influential literary theorists. This student-friendly volume starts this with the question "Who Was Bakhtin?" and leads on to cover topics including Authorship, Language, Dialogism, The Novel and the Carnivalesque. Since the post-perestroika opening of archives vast quantities of documentation have transformed and re-energised Bakhtin scholarship and it is crucial to be aware that the convenient label ‘Bakhtin’ does not signify a clearly defined body of work by a single author, an agreed set of ideas interpreted the same way by all Western critics or even a person we know very much about.