The fourteen essays collected in this volume, while diverse in their subject matter and approach, share a common concern with regard to the thoughts of Mikhail Bakhtin. This concern, relating to the context in which we need to refer in order to understand the origins and the potential of Bakhtin's thought, is reflected in essays that are immediate and oblique, personal and impersonal, intellectual and theoretical in context. Five of the essays are by well-known Russian scholars whose work on Bakhtin has not previously been translated in English, while the remaining nine are by established and emerging Bakhtin specialists in North America, the United Kingdom, and Europe.