In "Carnival and Carnivalesque," Mikhail Bakhtin describes how the popular carnival life began to disappear from the 17th century onwards. The carnival lost its central role in people's lives, its forms deteriorated, and it lost its authentic meaning as a communal performance in the public square. However, Bakhtin argues that certain aspects of the carnival persisted and were preserved in modern forms of theatrical and other spectacular performances.
Bakhtin suggests that the carnivalesque sense of the world influenced language and literature, shaping their modern forms. The carnivalesque form was expressed through a language of artistic imagery that retained the sensory nature of the carnival. For instance, Bakhtin explains how the carnival's familiarity transformed into certain types of prose, reflected in plot structures, situations, narration styles, and language. During the Renaissance, the carnivalesque worldview and its elements of laughter, symbolic acts of coronation and deposition, change, and ambivalent customs infiltrated and transformed almost all genres of artistic literature. However, as the carnival declined in the 17th century, its direct influence on literature diminished, and carnivalization and carnivalesque traditions remained primarily as literary traditions.
Although the carnival as a specific cultural form no longer exists in modern times, Bakhtin argues that its legacy, traditions, and functions continue to live on. Cultural researchers, like John Fiske in "Understanding Popular Culture," have suggested that certain contemporary cultural forms, such as TV game-shows, retain the nature and function of the medieval carnival as described by Mikhail Bakhtin.
