An understanding of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin is essential for a comprehensive grasp of contemporary debates in literary theory, language and social history. Bakhtinian Thought offers a collection of writings by Bakhtin, Voloshinov and Medvedev to be accompanied by a full introduction to the work, by the editor Simon Dentith. This collection includes extracts from all the major areas of their work, and makes accessible to the student and teacher pieces of writing previously difficult to locate. Among the texts reproduced are: Language, Speech and Utterance; Material and Device as Components...

Parody is part of all our lives. It occurs not only in literature, but also in everyday speech, in theatre and television, architecture and films. Drawing on examples from Aristophanes to The Simpsons, Simon Dentith explores:
* the place of parody in the history of literature
* parody as a subversive or conservative mode of writing
* parody's pivotal role in debates about postmodernism
* parody in the culture wars from ancient times to the present
This lively introduction situates parody at the heart of literary and cultural studies and offers a remarkably clear guide...

In the nineteenth century, epic poetry in the Homeric style was widely seen as an ancient and anachronistic genre, yet Victorian authors worked to recreate it for the modern world. Simon Dentith explores the relationship between epic and the evolution of Britain's national identity in the nineteenth century up to the apparent demise of all notions of heroic warfare in the catastrophe of the First World War. Paradoxically, writers found equivalents of the societies which produced Homeric or Northern epics not in Europe, but on the margins of empire and among its subject peoples. Dentith...

In the nineteenth century, epic poetry in the Homeric style was widely seen as an ancient and anachronistic genre, yet Victorian authors worked to recreate it for the modern world. Simon Dentith explores the relationship between epic and the evolution of Britain's national identity in the nineteenth century up to the apparent demise of all notions of heroic warfare in the catastrophe of the First World War. Paradoxically, writers found equivalents of the societies which produced Homeric or Northern epics not in Europe, but on the margins of empire and among its subject peoples. Dentith...

'Frank has but one duty before him. He must marry money.'
The squire of Greshamsbury has fallen on hard times, and it is incumbent on his son Frank to make a good marriage. But Frank loves the doctor's niece, Mary Thorne, a girl with no money and mysterious parentage. He faces a terrible dilemma: should he save the estate, or marry the girl he loves? Mary, too, has to battle her feelings, knowing that marrying Frank would ruin his family and fly in the face of his mother's opposition. Her pride is matched by that of her uncle, Dr Thorne, who has to decide whether to reveal a secret that...