{"product_id":"comic-enlightenment-9780691285849","title":"Comic Enlightenment","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eHow the seventeenth-century translations of notoriously obscene tales by Rabelais shaped some of the great works of eighteenth-century English fiction\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrançois Rabelais’s \u003ci\u003eGargantua and Pantagruel\u003c\/i\u003e—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 \u003ci\u003eGargantua and Pantagruel\u003c\/i\u003e 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 \u003ci\u003eComic Enlightenment\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eChallenging 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 \u003ci\u003eA Tale of a Tub\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eGulliver’s Travels\u003c\/i\u003e and Laurence Sterne’s \u003ci\u003eTristram Shandy\u003c\/i\u003e. 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Nicholas McDowell","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43489457307766,"sku":"9780691285849","price":39.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0671\/1374\/6550\/files\/CoreSourceHub_966318fa-c468-4adb-8391-2afd9d76c11c.jpg?v=1780868420","url":"https:\/\/ingramacademic.com\/products\/comic-enlightenment-9780691285849","provider":"Ingram Academic \u0026 Professional","version":"1.0","type":"link"}