This volume brings together nine essays by established and new scholars from Russia, Britain and North America to explore the historical contexts and current relevance of the work of the Bakhtin Circle for social theory, philosophy, history and linguistics.

"Set in the context of the various materialist approaches to literary aesthetics that emerged in the twentieth century, Renfrew's study presents a new synthesis of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) and his circle, Russian Formalism, and elements of the 'official' ideology of the early Soviet period. The book's central aim in offering such a synthesis is to negotiate the poles of postmodernist subjectivism and 'traditional' materialism around which much current literary and critical theory has stagnated, and, as the title suggests, to point the way towards a newly conceived material basis for textual and literary analysis."

This first comparative study of the philosophers and literary critics, Walter Benjamin and Mikhail Bakhtin, focuses on the two thinkers' conceptions of experience and form, investigating parallels between Bakhtin's theories of responsibility, dialogue, and the novel, and Benjamin's theories of translation, montage, allegory, and the aura.

An important collection of essays which treats Bakhtin as a provocative theorist whose work must be tested, explored and compared with the work of others. Contributors assess Bakhtin's contribution to difficult issues of colonialism, feminism, reception theory and theories of the body, amongst others. New articles explore the origins, previously unacknowledged, of Bakhtin's theory of language and provide a vivid account of the dramatic scandal surrounding Bakhtin's thesis on Rabelais. Contains dramatic new material, drawn from post-perestroika sources, which demythologizes the image of this important writer. A new bibliographical essay and introduction bring the English-language reader up-to-date with the progress of Bakhtin studies in Russia.

The Russian philosopher and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin has traditionally been seen as the leading figure in the group of intellectuals known as the Bakhtin Circle. The writings of other members of the Circle are considered much less important than his work, while Bakhtin's achievement has been exaggerated in proportion to the downgrading of the thinkers with whom he associated in the 1920s. This volume, which includes new translations and studies of the work of the most important members of the Circle, sets out to correct the distortions in the established representations of its activity. The original contributions to literary and linguistic theory made by Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev (but frequently credited to Bakhtin) are assessed, and the distinctiveness of their approaches is highlighted.

This volume provides a comprehensive overview of various Eastern European traditions of thought on the subject of translation as well as the discipline of Translation Studies. It sheds a light on how these traditions developed, how they are related to and how they differ from Western traditions. The volume shows nationally-framed histories of translation and Translation Studies and presents Eastern European pioneers and trailblazing thinkers in the discipline. This collection of articles, however, also shows that it is at times hard or even impossible to draw the line between theoretical and/or scientific thinking and pre-theoretical and/or pre-scientific thinking on translation. Furthermore, it shows that our discipline’s beginnings, which are supposedly rooted in Western scholarship, may have to be rethought and, consequently, rewritten.

Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning interest in the study of everyday life within the social sciences and humanities. In Critiques of Everyday Life Michael Gardiner proposes that there exists a counter-tradition within everyday life theorising. This counter-tradition has sought not merely to describe lived experience, but to transform it by elevating our understanding of the everyday to the status of a critical knowledge. In his analysis Gardiner engages with the work of a number of significant theorists and approaches that have been marginalized by mainstream academe, including: *The French tradition of everyday life theorising, from the surrealists to Henri Lefebvre, and from the Situationist International to Michel de Certeau *Agnes Heller and the relationship between the everyday, rationality and ethics *Carnival, prosaics and intersubjectivity in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin *Dorothy E. Smith's feminist perspective on everyday life. Critiques of Everyday Life demonstrates the importance of an alternative, multidisciplinary everyday life paradigm and offers a myriad of new possibilities for critical social and cultural theorising and empirical research.

The chapters in this book reflect on the major shifts in the views of early childhood thinkers and educators, who have contributed to contemporary theoretical frameworks pertaining to early childhood learning. The book also revisits and critically analyses the influence of developmental theories on early childhood education, starting in the 1890s with the work of G. Stanley Hall that established the close association of early childhood education and child development. Several chapters comprise critical examinations of the fundamental influence of thinkers such as Piaget, Vygotsky, Kohlberg, Adler, Pestalozzi, Froebel, and so on, on early childhood learning. The book also contends that these theoretical conceptions of child development have heavily influenced modern views of early childhood education. This book is a significant new contribution to early childhood learning, and will be a great resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Education, Public Policy, History of Education, Psychology, and Sociology. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Early Child Development and Care.

This innovative study brings the early writings of Mikhail Bakhtin into conversation with Max Scheler and Fyodor Dostoevsky to explore the question of what makes emotional co-experiencing ethically and spiritually productive. In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Bakhtin's well-known concept of the dialogical partner expresses what he sees as the potential of human relationships in Dostoevsky's work. But his earlier reflections on the ethical and aesthetic uses of empathy, in part inspired by Scheler's philosophy, suggest a still more fundamental form of communication that operates as a basis for human togetherness in Dostoevsky. Applying this rich and previously neglected theoretical apparatus in a literary analysis, Wyman examines the obstacles to active empathy in Dostoevsky's fictional world, considers the limitations and excesses of empathy, addresses the problem of frustrated love in The Idiot and Notes from Underground, and provides a fresh interpretation of two of Dostoevsky's most iconic characters, Prince Myshkin and Alyosha Karamazov.

Reading Ulysses with an eye to the cultural references embedded within it, Kershner interrogates modernism's relationship to contemporary popular culture and literature. Examples underscore Kershner's corrective to formal approaches to genre as he broadens the methodologies that are used to study it to include social and political approaches.