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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Comic Enlightenment: Rabelais and English Literature

Comic Enlightenment: Rabelais and English Literature

McDowell, Nicholas

Paperback

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 0691285845
ISBN13: 9780691285849
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: Aug 11 2026
Pages: 400
Weight: 1.23
Height: 0.89 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

How the seventeenth-century translations of notoriously obscene tales by Rabelais shaped some of the great works of eighteenth-century English fiction

François Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel--loosely related tales of gluttonous, drunken giants and their fantastic adventures--was one of the most notorious works of Renaissance Europe, condemned by both the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant reformer John Calvin as obscene and irreligious. In Elizabethan and early Stuart England, familiarity with Rabelais signaled membership in a cosmopolitan elite. But it was only with the seventeenth-century translations of Gargantua and Pantagruel by the eccentric Scottish laird Sir Thomas Urquhart and the Huguenot refugee Peter Motteux that Rabelaisian comedy became fully a part of English literature. In Comic Enlightenment, Nicholas McDowell reconstructs the cultural and political contexts of Urquhart and Motteux's work during the Civil Wars and Restoration and shows how this palimpsest of translations, notes and commentary influenced the development of satire and fiction in Britain and an emergent Anglo-Irish literary culture.

Challenging conventional accounts of the origins of the English novel, McDowell offers extensive new interpretations of landmark literary works of the eighteenth century, including Jonathan Swift's A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. McDowell's ambitious and sweeping account shows how the Rabelaisian became part of novelistic currency through the long history of translation and imitation of Rabelais's works.

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