David Lodge's novels include Deaf Sentence, Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work, Therapy, Thinks... and Author, Author. He has also written stage plays and screenplays, and several books of literary criticism, including The Art of Fiction, Consciousness and the Novel and, most recently, The Year of Henry James. Formerly Professor of English at Birmingham University, David now writes full-time. He continues to live in Birmingham.

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.