Neil Roberts' book, the first full-length study of Meredith's work for ten years, and the first to approach the novels in the light of modern literary theory, examines them from a Bakhtinian perspective, and shows with reference to numerous contemporary texts - artistic, polemical and personal - that the Meredithian novel is, in Bakhtin's words, a 'social dialogue among languages' that engages profoundly with the ideological discourses of its time, above all the discourses of gender. Meredith emerges as one of the most intriguingly subtle radical voices of the age, and a still not fully-discovered precursor of the modernist novel.