The Design Of Rabelais S Quart Livre De Pantagruel

En analysant le “dessin” du Tiers Livre - sa composition formelle aussi bien que son intention sous-jacente - E. Duval dégage la cohérence profonde d'une œuvre qui passe le plus souvent pour ambiguë et “ménippéenne”. Cette cohérence, qui se manifeste simultanément à deux niveaux (celui du dessin de Pantagruel dans la quête, celui du dessin de Rabelais dans son livre), permet à l'auteur non seulement de résoudre plusieurs apories de la critique rabelaisienne, mais de découvrir dans le Tiers Livre des dimensions et des ironies inaperçues jusqu'à présent.

An accessible, readable account of Rabelais, his work, his thought and his world.

In the first extended investigation of the importance of dramatic farce in Rabelais studies, Bruce Hayes makes an important contribution to the understanding of the theater of farce and its literary possibilities. By tracing the development of farce in late medieval and Renaissance comedic theater in comparison to the evolution of farce in Rabelais's work, Hayes distinguishes Rabelais's use of the device from traditional farce. While traditional farce is primarily conservative in its aims, with an emphasis on maintaining the status quo, Rabelais puts farce to radical new uses, making it subversive in his own work. Bruce Hayes examines the use of farce in Pantagruel, Gargantua, and the Tiers and Quart livres, showing how Rabelais recast farce in a humanist context, making it a vehicle for attacking the status quo and posing alternatives to contemporary legal, educational, and theological systems. Rabelais's Radical Farce illustrates the rich possibilities of a genre often considered simplistic and unsophisticated, disclosing how Rabelais in fact introduced both a radical reformulation of farce, and a new form of humanist satire.

Twenty-two eminent scholars of Early Modernity offer a thorough examination of the art and the main themes of François Rabelais’s work in the larger context of European humanism.

In the sixteenth century, a period of proliferating transatlantic travel and exploration, and, latterly, religious civil wars in France, the ship is freighted with political and religious, as well as poetic, significance; symbolism that reaches its height when ships—both real and symbolic—are threatened with disaster. The Direful Spectacle argues that, in the French Renaissance, shipwreck functions not only as an emblem or motif within writing, but as a part, or the whole, of a narrative, in which the dynamics of spectatorship and of co-operation are of constant concern. The possibility of ethical distance from shipwreck—imagined through the Lucretian suave mari magno commonplace—is constantly undermined, not least through a sustained focus on the corporeal. This book examines the ways in which the ship and the body are made analogous in Renaissance shipwreck writing; bodies are described and allegorized in nautical terms, and, conversely, ships themselves become animalized and humanized. Secondly, many texts anticipate that the description of shipwreck will have an affect not only on its victims, but on those too of spectators, listeners, and readers. This insistence on the physicality of shipwreck is also reflected in the dynamic of bricolage that informs the production of shipwreck texts in the Renaissance. The dramatic potential of both the disaster and the process of rebuilding is exploited throughout the century, culminating in a shipwreck tragedy. By the late Renaissance, shipwreck is not only the end, but often forms the beginning of a story.

Although modernity historically defined itself by relation to the medieval, the ways in which early moderns invoked and conceptualized the medieval are still insufficiently understood. This volume's seventeen essays present some preliminary explorations into the field of early modern medievalisms.

Drawing on the classical concept of rhetorical "dispositio," this study gives new interpretations of a number of literary texts of the French Renaissance (Rabelais, Du Bellay, Montaigne and others). The often problematic ordering of these texts is studied from a variety of perspectives, historical, theoretical and cultural.