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The dazzling and exuberant moral stories of Rabelais (c. 1471-1553)
expose human follies with their mischievous and often obscene
humour, while intertwining the realistic with carnivalesque fantasy
to make us look afresh at the world. Gargantua depicts a young
giant, reduced to laughable insanity by an education at the hands
of paternal ignorance, old crones and syphilitic professors, who is
rescued and turned into a cultured Christian knight. And in
Pantagruel and its three sequels, Rabelais parodied tall tales of
chivalry and satirized the law, theology and academia to portray
the bookish son of Gargantua who becomes a Renaissance Socrates,
divinely guided in his wisdom, and his idiotic, self-loving
companion Panurge.
Pantagruel recounts the life of a popular giant. From his
portentous birth and colorful childhood, to his visit to Paris and
his travels through Utopia, and not withstanding his enormous
appetite, Pantagruel's history is told with a breathtaking degree
of gaiety and wit. Ingeniously coining new expressions, and with an
unashamed obsession with bodily functions, Rabelais blends prose
and poetry, the sacred and profane, to offer a heady satire of the
religious society of his day. Physician and humanist Franois
Rabelais (c. 1494-1553) was a leading figure in Renaissance France.
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