Comic Enlightenment: Rabelais and English Literature - Softcover

McDowell, Nicholas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691285845 ISBN 13: 9780691285849

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nicholas McDowell is professor of early modern literature and thought at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton (Princeton), winner of the Milton Society of America’s James Holly Hanford Award, and the coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1640–1714.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691285845
• ISBN 13: 9780691285849
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 400
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar