Product details
- ISBN 9780691287911
- Dimensions: 156 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 11 Aug 2026
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
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.
