Gargantua and Pantagruel

Introduction

The Five Books of the Lives and Deeds of Gargantua and Pantagruel (French: Les Cinq livres des faits et dits de Gargantua et Pantagruel), often shortened to Gargantua and Pantagruel or the Cinq Livres (Five Books),[1] is a pentalogy of novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais.[a] It tells the adventures of two giants, Gargantua (/ɡɑːrˈɡæntjuə/ gar-GAN-tew-ə, French: [ɡaʁɡɑ̃tɥa]) and his son Pantagruel (/pænˈtæɡruɛl, -əl, ˌpæntəˈɡruːəl/ pan-TAG-roo-el, -⁠əl, PAN-tə-GROO-əl, French: [pɑ̃taɡʁyɛl]). The work is written in an amusing, extravagant, and satirical vein, features much erudition, vulgarity, and wordplay, and is regularly compared with the works of William Shakespeare and James Joyce.[2][3][4] Rabelais was a polyglot, and the work introduced "a great number of new and difficult words ... into the French language".[5]

The work was stigmatised as obscene by the censors of the Collège de la Sorbonne,[6] and, within a social climate of increasing religious oppression in a lead up to the French Wars of Religion, it was treated with suspicion, and contemporaries avoided mentioning it.[7]

"Pantagruelism", a form of stoicism, developed and applied throughout, is (among other things) "a certain gaiety of spirit confected in disdain for fortuitous things"[8] (French: une certaine gaîté d'esprit confite dans le mépris des choses fortuites).


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