After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism

by David Lodge

Now widely regarded as one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century, the Russian writer Mikhail Bakhtin was silenced by political censorship and persecution for most of his life. In "After Bakhtin", David Lodge sketches Bakhtin's extraordinary career, and explores the relevance of his ideas - on the dialogic nature of language, on the typology of fictional discourse, and on the carnivalesque - to the writings of authors as diverse as George Eliot, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Fay Weldon and Martin Amis. Further essays study particular texts - by Elizabeth Gaskell, Jane Austen, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling and Milan Kundera - illustrative of the development of the novel in its classic, modernist and postmodernist phases. Two final essays reflect on the current state of academic criticism.

Genres: Literature, Nonfiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

David John Lodge was an English author and critic. A literature professor at the University of Birmingham until 1987, some of his novels satirise academic life, notably the "Campus Trilogy" – Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), Small World: An Academic Romance (1984) and Nice Work (1988). The second two were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Another theme is Roman Catholicism, beginning from his first published novel The Picturegoers (1960). Lodge also wrote television screenplays and three stage plays. After retiring, he continued to publish literary criticism. His edition of Twentieth Century Literary Criticism (1972) includes essays on 20th-century writers such as T.S. Eliot. In 1992, he published The Art of Fiction, a collection of essays on literary techniques with illustrative examples from great authors, such as Point of View (Henry James), The Stream of Consciousness (Virginia Woolf) and Interior Monologue (James Joyce), beginning with Beginning and ending with Ending.

Reviews

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bir roman okur gibi...

[Richard Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lodge’s other half- illuminating articles with the Russian literary theorist at the center.