Rabelais and His World, Revised Edition

A new and improved translation of Mikhail Bakhtin's classic and celebrated study of carnival. Mikhail Bakhtin's classic study of carnival, laughter, the grotesque, and medieval and renaissance folk culture has been the inspiration for countless new ideas in the humanities, in literature and the arts, and throughout human culture over the last half-century. Rabelais and His World is a study devoted to French renaissance writer Fran ois Rabelais, author of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Rabelais, Bakhtin argues, can only be properly understood against the backdrop of a millennia-old tradition of festivity and laughter, a tradition that included the Roman saturnalia, medieval carnivals and feasts of fools, Greek satyr plays and symposia from antiquity, as well as countless medieval works belonging to various smaller genres, circus shows, foul language and gesture, and much more. Bakhtin claims this tradition is united by the imagery it uses and the worldview it expresses. Its imagery is