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Concept
Gargantua and Pantagruel
Summary
The Five Books of the Lives and Deeds of Gargantua and Pantagruel (Les Cinq livres des faits et dits de Gargantua et Pantagruel), often shortened to Gargantua and Pantagruel or the Cinq Livres (Five Books), is a pentalogy of novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais. It tells the adventures of two giants, Gargantua (gɑːrˈgæntjuə , ɡaʁɡɑ̃tɥa) and his son Pantagruel (pænˈtægruɛl,_-əl,_ˌpæntəˈgruːəl , 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. Rabelais was a polyglot, and the work introduced "a great number of new and difficult words [...] into the French language".
The work was stigmatised as obscene by the censors of the Collège de la Sorbonne, 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.
"Pantagruelism", a form of stoicism, developed and applied throughout, is (among other things) "a certain gaiety of spirit confected in disdain for fortuitous things" (French: une certaine gaîté d'esprit confite dans le mépris des choses fortuites).
The novels were written progressively without a preliminary plan.
The full modern English title for the work commonly known as Pantagruel is The Horrible and Terrifying Deeds and Words of the Very Renowned Pantagruel King of the Dipsodes, Son of the Great Giant Gargantua and in French, Les horribles et épouvantables faits et prouesses du très renommé Pantagruel Roi des Dipsodes, fils du Grand Géant Gargantua. The original title of the work was Pantagruel roy des dipsodes restitué à son naturel avec ses faictz et prouesses espoventables. Although most modern editions of Rabelais' work place Pantagruel as the second volume of a series, it was actually published first, around 1532 under the pen name "Alcofribas Nasier", an anagram of François Rabelais.
Official source
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