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Article: Enter Rabelais, Laughing.(Review)
- Article from:
- Renaissance Quarterly
- Article date:
- June 22, 2000
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 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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Barbara C. Bowen. Enter Rabelais, Laughing.
Nashville and London: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998. xv + 230 pp. $27.95. ISBN: 0-8265-1306-9.
In her brief assessment of current trends in Rabelais criticism, the author of this most recent study of the comic aspects of Rabelais's chronicles notes an unfortunate tendency among the recent crop of specialists to misunderstand the writer and his work by reducing the rich complexity of the Gargantua-Pantagruel to a single, impoverishing (albeit original) point of view, and by choosing to emphasize whatever they take to be Rabelais's message at the expense of the comic dimension of his book.
Enter ...