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Article: Rabelais, Renaissance, and Reformation: recent French works on the Renaissance.
- Article from:
- Renaissance Quarterly
- Article date:
- March 22, 1995
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1995 The Renaissance Society of America. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The renaissance is protean, forcing US to fix it with descriptive labels or bracket it with interpretive structures in order to make any sense of it. Recent works on Rabelais - himself a shifting and many faceted figure - not only illustrate this tendency but also illuminate the need for new interpretative models of the French Renaissance. Whereas some of these works attempt to fix Rabelais with the "humanist/humanism" label, others attempt to bracket him with post-modern interpretative structures, generally blending phenomenology, critical theory, and structuralism. And whereas some of these works unwittingly reveal the poverty of their interpretive frameworks, others ...