ABSTRACT
Bakhtin scholars have identified a wide range of sources for Bakhtin's ideas of carnival, but people select a narrow focus for this discussion to demonstrate by example Bakhtin's close parallels with others' work, and the use he made of it. The idea of carnival, its descriptive ally, the carnivalesque, and dynamic partner, carnivalization, are now generally acknowledged to be distanced from the historical reality of medieval European society; and there have been a variety of responses to carnival in scholarly literature. Caryl Emerson reviewed secondary literature on Bakhtin in The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin, and she gives considerable attention to literature on carnival. The association of Saturnalia and carnival is made by Bakhtin throughout Rabelais and His World, and more sparingly in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Bakhtin's concept of carnival moves beyond Frazer's, as he lifts carnival out of ethnographic data collection and Frazer's speculation about the symbolism of the carnival dummy.
