Rabelais and His World, a new translation

A new and improved translation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s classic and celebrated study of carnival.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s classic study of carnival, laughter, the grotesque, and medieval and renaissance folk culture has been the inspiration for countless new ideas in the humanities, in literature and the arts, and throughout human culture over the last half century.

Rabelais and His World is a study devoted to French Renaissance writer François Rabelais, author of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Rabelais, Bakhtin argues, can only be properly understood against the backdrop of a millennia-old tradition of festivity and laughter, a tradition that included the Roman Saturnalia, medieval carnivals and feasts of fools, and Greek satyr plays and symposia from antiquity, as well as countless medieval works belonging to various smaller genres, circus shows, foul language and gesture, and much more.

Bakhtin claims this tradition is united by the imagery it uses and the worldview it expresses. Its imagery is ambivalent. It effaces the boundaries between bodies, connects in one image birth with death, praise with invective. Its worldview is optimistic, defeating all fears and all official seriousness with laughter.

The book’s new translation is informed by recent scholarship on Bakhtin and contains the most extensive scholarly apparatus this book has received to date.Foreword: Bakhtin’s Tricksterly Depths and the Laughing Grotesque, Caryl Emerson
Translator’s Preface: Putting Bakhtin’s Rabelais Back in Context

Rabelais and His World: The Work of François Rabelais and the Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance
Introduction (Posing the Problem)
1 Rabelais in the History of Laughter
2 The Public-Square Word in Rabelais’s Novel
3 Folk-Festive Forms and Images in Rabelais’s Novel
4 Feasting Images in Rabelais
5 The Grotesque Image of the Body in Rabelais and Its Sources
6 Images of the Material-Bodily Nethers in Rabelais’s Novel
7 Rabelais’s Images and His Contemporary Reality

Addendum: Establishing Bakhtin’s Sources
Translator’s Notes
References
Index"This revised translation of Bakhtin's instant classic will renew his reputation as a thinker who speaks to our present post-humanist concerns; his illiberal embrace of the energy exuded by the masses is just as provocative as his skepticism of the mainstream and officialdom. Sandler's translation and scholarly apparatus are reassuringly attentive to detail; Emerson's foreword alerts the reader to Bakhtin's enduring significance in a manner that is both elegant and probing.”
—Galin Tihanov, George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of London Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) was a major Russian and Soviet philosopher, philologist, and literary scholar. He is the author of Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, as well as works in philosophy and on the theory of the European novel.

Sergeiy Sandler is an independent scholar who has published several major articles about the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and has translated Bakhtin’s writings into English and Hebrew. He coedits the interdisciplinary journal Language Under Discussion.