His account considerably predates the online practices explored in this chapter but offers a potentially useful framework through which to explore them (Taylor 1995). Rabelais and His World provides a history of carnival based on the thesis that laughter was once central to the public domain but has been increasingly forced to retreat to the realm of the private sphere with the reorganisation of cultural practices associated with the new bourgeois order. Originally completed as his dissertation in 1940, Rabelais and His World (Bakhtin 1984) became known to English readers when it was first translated in 1968. It is proposed that this account offers a potential way of situating the practices of today’s social media trolls in a cultural-historical perspective.

This chapter draws on another theoretical concept developed by Bakhtin, that of carnival as a literary practice realised through Rabelais and His World (1984).

1, Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia (also subsumed into Martin and White’s model of appraisal) provided a useful framework within which to explore Cavendish’s representation of himself in his autobiography where had interpolated a postrace media interview with an ironic commentary to create another voice. Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) is best known for his literary criticism, but it is a testament to the philosophical insight of his ideas that his work continues to be seen as highly relevant today and offers useful insight, particularly for sociolinguistics and discourse analysis.

Bakhtin rabelais and his world