Presents the complete works of French writer Francois Rabelais.

This classic work by the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) examines popular humor and folk culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. One of the essential texts of a theorist who is rapidly becoming a major reference in contemporary thought, Rabelais and His World is essential reading for anyone interested in problems of language and text and in cultural interpretation.

"A Companion to François Rabelais offers the most comprehensive and up-to-date account of the works of François Rabelais, one of the most influential writers of the Western literary tradition. A monk, medical doctor, translator and editor, Rabelais embodies the ideals of Renaissance humanism. His genre-bending fiction combines vast erudition, comic verve, and critical observations of all spheres of contemporary life that are relevant to this day. Two sections of this volume situate Rabelais's work in the larger social, political, and literary context of his time. A third section gives concise interpretations of each of the five books of the Pantagrueline Chronicles. The contributors are eminent scholars of early modern literature, many of whom write in English for the first time"--

With his birth itself a monumental exploit in itself, it is clear that the giant Pantagruel is destined to great things, and the novel that bears his name chronicles his the remarkable life of the exuberant youth: from his voracious reading habits to his escapades with the knave Panurge and his prowess in battle. The second work in this volume deals with the history of his father Gargantua, whose biography is equally if not more outlandish and larger than life.But these bawdy and boisterous tales, with their fixation on food and faeces, are not just entertaining yarns, as Francois Rabelais, one of the foremost humanists of the sixteenth century, parodies medieval learning, lambasts the established church authority and develops his own ideal visions for the ordering of society.

Rabelais's hilarious, scabrous and often scatological fantasy of life amonth the monks and friars of sixteenth-century France remains a satirical and comic classic. A great broth of a book in which every conceivable literary form is parodied and every human desire satirized. But under the comedy there is a serious purpose, for Rabelais also enspouses a positive view of life in which tolerance, goodness, understanding and wisdom are opposed to dogmatism, pride and cruelty. The book is here presented in the classic translation by Urquhart and Motteux.