Pantagruel

After the all-powerful wizard Susnam Evyndd is defeated during battle with an evil clan of sorcerers, the world is plunged into darkness. If the spell is not quickly reversed, all plants will die off from lack of sun, until everything & everyone-is destroyed. Yet Evyndd's death sets off his last & greatest spell, transforming his household pets into humans. With Evyndd's instructions, the group sets out to return light to the world...but pursuing the missing light promises to be difficult & dangerous & carries no guarantee of success.

Consisting of five books, this masterpiece is Rabelais' magnum opus. It chronicles different events in the life of Gargantua and his son Pantagruel. Using his learned wit and biting satire as a facade, Rabelais discusses several serious issues. The apparent humour and brilliant use of language offers pure reading pleasure. Entertaining and profound!

With his birth itself a monumental exploit in itself, it is clear that the giant Pantagruel is destined to great things, and the novel that bears his name chronicles his the remarkable life of the exuberant youth: from his voracious reading habits to his escapades with the knave Panurge and his prowess in battle. The second work in this volume deals with the history of his father Gargantua, whose biography is equally if not more outlandish and larger than life.But these bawdy and boisterous tales, with their fixation on food and faeces, are not just entertaining yarns, as Francois Rabelais, one of the foremost humanists of the sixteenth century, parodies medieval learning, lambasts the established church authority and develops his own ideal visions for the ordering of society.

This coloring book is unlike any you've seen before. The artwork was drawn in the 1500s! Now in the public domain, these images depict intriguing and grotesque creatures. Some are mostly human, but many are not. There are fish-people, bog creatures, and inanimate objects given life. Many of the creatures are quite well-endowed, and there is indeed a phallic theme running through the figures. This coloring book is not for children!

Presents the complete works of French writer Francois Rabelais.

This classic work by the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) examines popular humor and folk culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. One of the essential texts of a theorist who is rapidly becoming a major reference in contemporary thought, Rabelais and His World is essential reading for anyone interested in problems of language and text and in cultural interpretation.

The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel (French: La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel) is a pentalogy of novels written in the 16th century by Fran�ois Rabelais, which tells of the adventures of two giants, Gargantua . The text is written in an amusing, extravagant, and satirical vein, and features much crudity, scatological humor, and violence (lists of explicit or vulgar insults fill several chapters).The censors of the Coll�ge de la Sorbonne stigmatized it as obscene, and in 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. According to Rabelais, the philosophy of his giant Pantagruel, "Pantagruelism", is rooted in "a certain gaiety of mind pickled in the scorn of fortuitous things" (French: une certaine ga�t� d'esprit confite dans le m�pris des choses fortuites).Rabelais had studied Ancient Greek and he applied it in inventing hundreds of new words in the text, some of which became part of the French language. Wordplay and risqu� humor abound in his writing.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 �pouvantables faits et prouesses du tr�s renomm� Pantagruel Roi des Dipsodes, fils du Grand G�ant Gargantua. The original title of the work was Pantagruel roy des dipsodes restitu� � son naturel avec ses faictz et prouesses espoventables. Although most modern editions of Rabelais's 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 Fran�ois Rabelais.Pantagruel was a sequel to an anonymous book entitled The Great Chronicles of the Great and Enormous Giant Gargantua (in French, Les Grandes Chroniques du Grand et Enorme G�ant Gargantua). This early Gargantua text enjoyed great popularity, despite its rather poor construction. Rabelais's giants are not described as being of any fixed height, as in the first two books of Gulliver's Travels, but vary in size from chapter to chapter to enable a series of astonishing images as though these were tall tales. For example, in one chapter Pantagruel is able to fit into a courtroom to argue a case, but in another the narrator resides inside Pantagruel's mouth for 6 months and discovers an entire nation living around his teeth.At the beginning of this book, Gargantua's wife dies giving birth to Pantagruel, who grows to be as giant and scholarly as his father. Rabelais gives a catalog of his reading, mostly humorously-titled books, and judgements in nonsensical legal cases. "The lion's share of Pantagruel's seventh chapter consists of a concluding catalog attributed to the Abbey of Saint-Victor", states Bodemer in his essay, "Rabelais and the Abbey of Saint-Victor Revisited."

This text parodies everyone from eminent classical authors and schoolmen to Rabelais's own acquaintances. But the brilliance of the book lies not merely in these learned references, but in the story into which they are woven.