Rabelais's Carnival: Text, Context, Metatext

Samuel Kinser argues that Rabelais' Fourth Book has been distorted due to its performative and literary contexts, overlooking the innovative use of printing. Kinser's interpretation evokes the gestures, games, and visual, oral, bodily semantics of Carnival and Lent as they were performed in Rabelais' day, and emphasizes the importance of the invention of printing.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 308 pages
Publication date: 29 April 2022
Publisher: University of California Press

After four centuries, it is astonishing that a significant episode in Rabelais' novels remains systematically misinterpreted. The episode, which playfully and grotesquely explores the relationship between Carnival and Lent, occurs in Rabelais' Fourth Book, his final and most artfully crafted novel. Samuel Kinser argues that the text has been distorted due to critics' failure to consider the episode's performative and literary contexts, overlooking the innovative use Rabelais made of his immediate world in his work. In this original interpretation of the Fourth Book, Kinser evokes the gestures, games, and visual, oral, bodily semantics of Carnival and Lent as they were performed in Rabelais' day. He also highlights the importance of printing, an innovation that revolutionized the relationships between author and reader. Recognizing this and fearing it, Rabelais adopted an extraordinary set of disguises as an author, disguises that, in their bewildering interplay, constitute the truest sense of his carnival.

This title is part of UC Press' Voices Revived program, which commemorates the University of California Press' mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

Weight: 454g
Dimension: 234 x 156 x 18 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780520306158