Acknowledging the importance of Bakhtin s concept of the dialogic, Judy Little utilizes the insights of Bakhtin and theorists such as Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard as strategies for examining the political complexity of the "self" as Virginia Woolf, Barbara Pym, and Christine Brooke-Rose construct it in their fiction.

Little demonstrates that the tradition of the self-as-individual belongs to a complex, intricately dialogic discourse, with the self being an ongoing experiment in heteroglossia rather than a single, monologic "ism." Woolf, Pym, and Brooke-Rose, she argues, manifest a...