This book has two main purposes: 1) to explore the connection that links Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of consciousness to his theory of the novel, locating the former's origins in carnival, and in certain carnivalised forms of literature and thought; and 2) to bring Petronius’ Satyrica fully into Bakhtin's account of the novel's origins in a way that he himself might have, but never did. The plan of the book is crisply laid out in the introduction, which gives an overview of Bakhtin's life and works while making several provocative connections to the life and single massive work of Petronius. In ch. 1, Branham shows that, for Bakhtin, at the heart of the modern novel, and serving to set this form off from all forms that preceded it, was a new way not just of representing, but of conceptualising time and space. In ch. 2, the fuller ramifications of this ‘chronotopic’ understanding of genre is explored in connection with Bakhtin's conception of consciousness itself: with new conceptualisations of time come new representations of consciousness as emergent (but never fully emerged) in time. Ch. 3 explores the role played by ancient Menippean satire in Bakhtin's thought, where it functions as a crucial first step towards the full reconceptualisation of time and space that modern novels both make use of and require for the selves they represent. Finally, in ch. 4, B. turns the microscope onto the heteroglossia of Petronius in order to show how the Satyrica has everything in it (or nearly so) that Bakhtin valued as defining characteristics in modern novels, but found either underdeveloped, or altogether wanting, in all ancient forms.

A fundamental strength of this book is its explanatory power. Beyond his famous, big picture tags (‘lower bodily stratum’, ‘dialogism’, ‘heteroglossia’, etc.) Bakhtin has always been hard to make sense of in any comprehensive way because his works are highly experimental, always testing ideas that might emerge as theory and stay for a while, or might misfire and have no lasting impact. Contradictions and failures to cohere abound in Bakhtin, and thus we tend to resort to big-picture slogans to explain what he is about. B. helps sort through the mess by accounting for the development of Bakhtin's thought over time in ways that make sense of its ups and downs. Always at the heart of it all, he argues, is Bakhtin's theory of the dialogic nature of human consciousness; that is, of the self as always in dialogue with others’ perspectives of oneself, always in conversation, as it were, with perspectives taken from the outside. This, according to Bakhtin, is what modern novels give us to see and experience in ways that earlier literary forms did not: they exteriorise the inner workings of selves as they really are, always emerging, always working towards full ‘coincidence’ with themselves, but never managing to finish themselves off.

Modern novels, for Bakhtin, give us to see the dialogic striving that is the human self by opening up real human interiority for all to experience and tumble forward with in time. By comparison, Bakhtin regarded ancient forms as unforthcoming, and relatively static and time-frozen in the selves they give us to see. Epic, lyric, even romance: all are stuck giving ‘generic’ versions of the humans whom they either describe or give us to look at and hear account for themselves. For Bakhtin, ancient characters were monologic and unreal because they were expressions of pre-formed generic souls. For the most part, B. lets Bakhtin get away with his schematic overstatements about the under-characterisations and non-complexity of ancient persons/characters via specific forms — much of what Bakhtin says about ancient literature does not bear up to serious scrutiny. But he gamely takes him to task on the matter of what Bakhtin implies is not there in Petronius’ Satyrica. In Encolpius, the novel's intradiegetic narrator, B. proposes that we have a character who fully fits the bill of Bakhtin's ever-emergent, dialogical self. The proof of this comes via a series of extended close readings of the Satyrica in the final chapter of the book. All very smart.

Anyone interested in understanding the history of the novel within a Bakhtinian framework will have much to gain from this book. B.'s analysis finds Bakhtinian polyphony and dialogism in places where Bakhtin himself did not manage to find them, and thus it offers new insights, gained from ancient writing, into the question of the novel's origins, and what it takes really to count as a novel. Among the book's biggest strengths is its exceptionally fine explanation of Bakhtin's ‘chronotopes’, which is one of the most difficult concepts that Bakhtin put into play, but never fully explained. The book also does an excellent job of locating and explaining the hidden logic that underlies Bakhtin's fourteen traits of Menippean satire, the one form that Bakhtin found moving not very far, but noticeably in the direction of novelistic polyphony. But, ultimately, the biggest contribution of the book is in the case that B. makes for the emergence of polyphonic characterisation in the emerging ancient forms themselves: somewhat along the way in ancient Romance; much more so in Menippean satire; then quite close to the real thing, if not the thing itself, in Petronius’ Satyrica.