ABSTRACT
Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais and carnival, translated into English in 1968 as Rabelais and His World, provides some of his most exciting and controversial writing. It continues to be controversial now-one of Bakhtin’s first translators and influential promoters in the American academy, Caryl Emerson, has written that ‘the weakest, least consistent, and most dangerous category in Bakhtin’s arsenal is the concept of “carnival”’.1 And it was certainly controversial in a Russian academy intimidated by Stalinism, so much so that though the work on the thesis on which the book is based was completed in 1940, it was not examined until 1947, no degree was awarded until 1951 (and that after some controversy), and it was not published as a book until 1965.
