Comic Enlightenment : Rabelais and English Literature / Nicholas McDowell.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McDowell, Nicholas.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (0 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2026.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Cover

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Archdeacon Grantly's Secret

or, Being Rabelaisian

Part I. Fiction, Satire and Translation, 1590-1694

1. Monstrous Wit: Rabelais in English Before the English Rabelais

The Double Personality of Rabelaisian Comedy

'A Master of Scoffing'

'Such a Gargantuist': Prose Satire in the 1590s

Pedagogy and Pantagruelism

2. A Rabelaisian Scotsman in King Oliver's Court: Language, Utopia and the Nonsense of Revolution

Scottish Utopians

A Civil War of Words

The Politics of Nonsense

'Posteriour Uses'

3. Gargantua and the Leviathan: Translation, Patronage and Cultural Politics in the British Republic

'Most Noble and Illustrious Drinkers'

'Of wit corrupted': Anti-Puritan Republicanism

The Rabelaisian Body Politic of Post-Regicide Britain

Inventing a Culture Without a King

'A fit of excessive laughter'

4. Rabelais in the Restoration Coffeehouse: Wit, Conversation and Anticlerical Satire

Coffee, Books and Buffooning

'Betwixt the Civil and the Ecclesiastical Giant': Anglo-French Networks of Wit

'A jerking, flirting way of writing': Anatomising Priestcraft

5. A Rabelaisian Refugee in the Whig World: Religious Persecution, Forced Migration and the Politics of Literary Translation

The Disintegration of Laughter?

Rabelais in Grub Street

The Religious Politics of Pantagruelism

Whigs and Tories, 'Pantagruellists' and 'Andouillians

Part II. Translation, Satire and the Novel, 1694-1775

6. 'Betwixt Some Meaning &amp

No Meaning': Pope, Swift and the Scriblerian Rabelais

'Dr Swift likes it Much'

'Mr Pope Seems to be Quite Angry With that Writer'

'The great Original of Banter': Ridicule and the Rabelaisian Style.

7. 'An Emblem Without a Key to't': A Tale of a Tub, the Moderns and the Rabelaisian Reader

Heresy, Modernity and Narrative

Translation and 'the Humour of the Age'

'Taste me this fine Chapter': Consuming Texts

Platonic and Rabelaisian Dogs

8. 'Rablais himself [. . .] was the Gulliver of that Age': Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal and Body Politics

Gulliver's Rabelaisian Wonderland

'The Anagrammatick Method': Gulliver's Travels and Political Allegory

'Sun-Beams Out of Cucumbers': The Rabelaisian Project of Gulliver's Travels

'A grave Author, an eminent French Physician': Debased Bodies in A Modest Proposal

9. 'As Rabelaic a Fellow as Ever Piss'd': Sterne, the English Rabelais, and the Morality of Fiction

Fiction, Translation, Dirtiness

'The Prudish Humour of Particulars': Indecency and Interpretation

Rabelaisian Monks and the 'spirit of Shandeism'

'A Fragment in the Manner of Rabelais'

10. 'Motley Emblem of My Work!': Tristram Shandy, A Sentimental Journey and the Rabelaisian Novel

'Suffer Her Not to Look into Rabelais'

'The Dark Veil of Allegories': From A Political Romance to Tristram Shandy

'And Pray Who Was Tickletoby's mare?'

'One Compleat System of Modern Politics'

'All the Wit That Ever Rabelais Scatter'd': From Tristram Shandy to A Sentimental Journey

Epilogue: Orwell's Pornographer

or, Archdeacon Grantly Remembered

Notes

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Other Format:

Print version: McDowell, Nicholas Comic Enlightenment

ISBN:

9780691287928

OCLC:

1595737337