M. M. Bakhtin has emerged as one of the major literary critics of the twentieth century. His importance in various fields, such as semiotics, literary theory, sociology, linguistics, psychology, and anthropology, is increasingly recognized. His posthumous fame comes in stricking contrast to his obscurity during his lifetime (1895-1975). His books on the Freudianism (1927), on Formalism (1928) and on Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929) were published as the works of others, as were a number of important essays. His study of Dostoevsky appeared under his own name. Some manuscripts were never published. His book on Rabelais, completed in 1940, remained unpublished for twenty-five years. Bakhtin's Theory of The Novel is an attempt to understand some aspects of the form of novel in relation to the Anglo-American tradition of the novel since Henry James.