I would like to express my thanks to my friends and colleagues, particularly Craig Brandist, Jeremy Tambling, Ackbar Abbas, and Galin Tihanov for their unstinting support and for many hours of interesting discussions, some of which have produced an answering echo in this book. In his capacity as director of the Bakhtin Centre at the University of Sheffield, Craig Brandist has been especially generous in extending his hospitality to enable me to participate in its programme of lectures and discussions. I am also very grateful for the support over several years of its founding director, David Shepherd. I have benefitted from the lively discussions at a number of the series of International Bakhtin Conferences initiated by Clive Thomson and held at various locations across the world. These have provided me with many friendships, and with the memorable differences of opinion, which they have enabled me to grapple with. I hope that they will continue to do so. The reader will judge for herself if these exchanges have been fruitful. The test here is not whether my explorations are conclusive, although I hope that they are provocative, but whether they open up a useable potential for further questions. Here, paradoxically, I would leave the last word to Mikhaïl Mikhaïlovich Bakhtin who wrote that the “last word” is never spoken.