Brandist, Craig. The Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy, Culture, and Politics London: Pluto Press, 2002. Brandist’s study has the virtue of being about the Bakhtin Circle (Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov) as a whole and it benefits from Brandist’s exceptional knowledge of the intellectual history of the period.Google Scholar

Clark, Katerina and Holquist, Michael. Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. This is the only biography extant in English and, while some of it has been superseded by later scholarship, it remains a readable introduction to the work.Google Scholar

Gardiner, Michael (ed.), Mikhail Bakhtin. 4 vols. London: Sage Publications, 2003. An excellent and extensive collection of Bakhtin criticism and scholarship.Google Scholar

Pearce, Lynn. Reading Dialogics. London: Edward Arnold, 1994. Pearce’s book is more of a how-to guide than a monograph about Bakhtin, but it’s extremely useful.Google Scholar

Pechey, Graham. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Word in the World. London: Routledge, 2007. An excellent exploration of Bakhtin’s ideas by a shrewd, perceptive, and theoretically astute critic.Google Scholar

Renfrew, Alastair. Mikhail Bakhtin. Abingdon: Routledge, 2015. A sharp and intelligent introduction.Google Scholar

Secondary Sources

Bialostosky, Don. How to Play a Poem. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017. Not merely a book about Bakhtin and poetry, but a consistently clever and engaging book about how to use Bakhtin to teach poetry.Google Scholar

Brandist, Craig, Shepherd, David, and Tihanov, Galin. The Bakhtin Circle: In the Master’s Absence. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Fascinating studies on the other members of the Bakhtin Circle.Google Scholar

Emerson, Caryl. The First Hundred Years of Bakhtin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. A subtle and very interesting account of the history of Bakhtin’s reception and interpretation.Google Scholar

Felch, Susan M. and Contino, Paul J.. Bakhtin and Religion: A Feeling for Faith. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001. Interesting collection of essays on Bakhtin’s relation and possible debts to Christian thought.Google Scholar

Kliger, Ilya. ‘Heroic aesthetics and modernist critique: extrapolations from Bakhtin’s author and hero in aesthetic activity’. Slavic Review 67, 3 (2008), 551–66. ‘Dostoevsky and the novel-tragedy: genre and modernity in Ivanov, Pumpyansky, and Bakhtin’. PMLA 126, 1 (2011), 73–87. ‘On “genre memory” in Bakhtin’. In Kliger and Boris Maslow (eds.), Persistent Forms: Explorations in Historical Poetics, 227–51. New York: Fordham University Press. Shrewd and insightful studies of Bakhtin’s theory in its historical context.CrossRef Google Scholar

Stallybrass, Peter and White, Allon. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. London: Methuen, 1986. A brilliant historical study of Bakhtin’s theory of carnival.Google Scholar

Stam, Robert. Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. An inventive and subtle application of Bakhtin’s ideas to film, with particular attention to Latin American cinema and carnival.Google Scholar

Tihanov, Galin, The Master and the Slave: Lukács, Bakhtin, and the Ideas of Their Time. Oxford. Clarendon Press, 2000. A rigorous, insightful comparison of these two figures.CrossRef Google Scholar

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