Enter Rabelais, Laughing

Enter Rabelais, Laughing PDF Author: Barbara C. Bowen
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN: 9780826513069
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Francois Rabelais (1483?-1553) is a difficult and often misunderstood author, whose reputation for coarse "Rabelaisian" jesting and "Gargantuan" indulgence in food, drink, and sex is highly misleading. He was in fact a committed humanist who expressed strong views on religion, good government, education, and much more through the mock-heroic adventures of his giants. While most books about Rabelais have relatively little to say about his comedic genius, Enter Rabelais, Laughing analyses the many sides of Rabelais's humor, focusing on why his writing was so hilariously funny to sixteenth-century readers. The author begins by discussing how the Renaissance defined laughter and situates Rabelais in a long tradition of literary laughter. Subsequent chapters examine specific contexts relevant to Gargantua and Pantagruel, beginning with the comic aspects of epic, chronicle, mock-epic, and farce, and proceeding to Renaissance and Reformation humanist satire, rhetoric, medicine, and law. All of these chapters combine information, much of it new, on the humanist message Rabelais wanted to convey to his readers, with an analysis of how he used his wit to reinforce his message. Rarely is a writer's work treated in such illuminating detail. On a broad level, Enter Rabelais, Laughing serves as an excellent introduction to French Renaissance literature and exhibits a remarkably charming and lucid writing style, free of jargon. To Rabelais scholars in particular it offers a thorough and innovative analysis that corrects misconceptions and questions commonly held views.

Enter Rabelais, Laughing

Enter Rabelais, Laughing PDF Author: Barbara C. Bowen
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN: 9780826513069
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book Here

Book Description
Francois Rabelais (1483?-1553) is a difficult and often misunderstood author, whose reputation for coarse "Rabelaisian" jesting and "Gargantuan" indulgence in food, drink, and sex is highly misleading. He was in fact a committed humanist who expressed strong views on religion, good government, education, and much more through the mock-heroic adventures of his giants. While most books about Rabelais have relatively little to say about his comedic genius, Enter Rabelais, Laughing analyses the many sides of Rabelais's humor, focusing on why his writing was so hilariously funny to sixteenth-century readers. The author begins by discussing how the Renaissance defined laughter and situates Rabelais in a long tradition of literary laughter. Subsequent chapters examine specific contexts relevant to Gargantua and Pantagruel, beginning with the comic aspects of epic, chronicle, mock-epic, and farce, and proceeding to Renaissance and Reformation humanist satire, rhetoric, medicine, and law. All of these chapters combine information, much of it new, on the humanist message Rabelais wanted to convey to his readers, with an analysis of how he used his wit to reinforce his message. Rarely is a writer's work treated in such illuminating detail. On a broad level, Enter Rabelais, Laughing serves as an excellent introduction to French Renaissance literature and exhibits a remarkably charming and lucid writing style, free of jargon. To Rabelais scholars in particular it offers a thorough and innovative analysis that corrects misconceptions and questions commonly held views.

Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times

Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times PDF Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110245485
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 864

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Book Description
Despite popular opinions of the ‘dark Middle Ages’ and a ‘gloomy early modern age,’ many people laughed, smiled, giggled, chuckled, entertained and ridiculed each other. This volume demonstrates how important laughter had been at times and how diverse the situations proved to be in which people laughed, and this from late antiquity to the eighteenth century. The contributions examine a wide gamut of significant cases of laughter in literary texts, historical documents, and art works where laughter determined the relationship among people. In fact, laughter emerges as a kaleidoscopic phenomenon reflecting divine joy, bitter hatred and contempt, satirical perspectives and parodic intentions. In some examples protagonists laughed out of sheer happiness and delight, in others because they felt anxiety and insecurity. It is much more difficult to detect premodern sculptures of laughing figures, but they also existed. Laughter reflected a variety of concerns, interests, and intentions, and the collective approach in this volume to laughter in the past opens many new windows to the history of mentality, social and religious conditions, gender relationships, and power structures.

Laughter and Power

Laughter and Power PDF Author: John Phillips
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039105045
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Laughter and power are here examined in a variety of contexts, ranging from the satires of Renaissance Humanism through to the polemics of contemporary journalism. How do the powerful use laughter as a cultural weapon which reinforces their position? How do the powerless use laughter as a last resort in their self-defence? Sixteenth-century intellectuals applied their satires to a campaign against intolerance. Seventeenth-century absolutism demanded of comedy that it serve its interests. Yet subversive humour survived, even at the court, and led through the Enlightenment to its apogee in the black humour of Sade. Twentieth-century experimental fiction owes that trend a conscious debt. Meanwhile an aesthetic tradition, represented here by Flaubert, Beckett and Queneau, incites a laughter which releases tension rather than raising awareness. As humour theorists, Bergson, Freud and Koestler help focus these concerns.

The Laughing Philosopher

The Laughing Philosopher PDF Author: Mary Patricia Willcocks
Publisher: London : G. Allen and Unwin
ISBN:
Category : Authors, French
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description


The Rabelais Encyclopedia

The Rabelais Encyclopedia PDF Author: Elizabeth C. Zegura
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313061564
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
The French humanist Rabelais (ca. 1483-1553) was the greatest French writer of the Renaissance and one of the most influential authors of all time. His Gargantua and Pantagruel, written in five books between 1532 and 1553, rivals the works of Shakespeare and Cervantes in terms of artistry, complexity of ideas and expression, and historical importance. Rabelais is read in numerous courses in French Literature, Renaissance Studies, and Western Civilization, and his writings continue to attract the attention of scholars and general readers alike. The first work of its kind, this encyclopedia is a comprehensive guide to his life and writings. Included are several hundred alphabetically arranged entries by expert contributors. These entries discuss his characters, his overt and veiled references to historical and Renaissance figures and events, his literary and philosophical allusions, his major themes, and the key events and influences that shaped his career. The entries cover such topics as education, religion, censors and censorship, humanism, death, and warfare. Entries cite works for further reading, and the encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography.

A History of English Laughter

A History of English Laughter PDF Author: Manfred Pfister
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042012882
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Is there a 'history' of laughter? Or isn't laughter an anthropological constant rather and thus beyond history, a human feature that has defined humanity as homo ridens from cave man and cave woman to us? The contributors to this collection of essays believe that laughter does have a history and try to identify continuities and turning points of this history by studying a series of English texts, both canonical and non-canonical, from Anglosaxon to contemporary. As this is not another book on the history of the comic or of comedy it does not restrict itself to comic genres; some of the essays actually go out of their way to discover laughter at the margins of texts where one would not have expected it all - in Beowulf, or Paradise Lost or the Gothic Novel. Laughter at the margins of texts, which often coincides with laughter from the margins of society and its orthodoxies, is one of the special concerns of this book. This goes together with an interest in 'impure' forms of laughter - in laughter that is not the serene and intellectually or emotionally distanced response to a comic stimulus which is at the heart of many philosophical theories of the comic, but emotionally disturbed and troubled, aggressive and transgressive, satanic and sardonic laughter. We do not ask, then, what is comic, but: who laughs at and with whom where, when, why, and how?

Medieval Humour

Medieval Humour PDF Author: Kleio Pethainou
Publisher: Trivent Publishing
ISBN: 6156405712
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
Simultaneously pervasive and evasive, rebellious and oppressive, transgressive and socially specific, humour is a vast and interdisciplinary field of research. Seeking to rethink this quintessentially human expression, this volume is bringing together established and emerging directions of medieval humour research. Each contribution explores different artistic expressions, receptions and functions of humour and identifies a series of problems in researching humour historically. Medieval Humour: Expressions, Receptions and Functions dissects humour in art and thought, literature and drama, society and culture, contributing to a deeper understanding of our cultural past.

A Companion to François Rabelais

A Companion to François Rabelais PDF Author: Bernd Renner
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004460233
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 639

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Book Description
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.

Rabelais and His World

Rabelais and His World PDF Author: Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich Bakhtin
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253203410
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
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.

Rabelais's Radical Farce

Rabelais's Radical Farce PDF Author: E. Bruce Hayes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317072316
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
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.