François Rabelais
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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François Rabelais (c. 1494 - April 9, 1553) was a major French Renaissance writer best remembered for Gargantua and Pantagruel and his relation to the grotesque.
Contemporary writers on Rabelais
Rabelais has attracted many modern writers and scholars. One of the most notable was English mystic, Aleister Crowley.
Anatole France lectured on him in Argentina. John Cowper Powys, D. B. Wyndham Lewis, and Lucien Febvre (one of the founders of the French historical school Annales) wrote books about him. Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian philosopher and critic, derived his celebrated concept of the carnivalesque and grotesque body from the world of Rabelais.
Rabelais was also a major reference point for a few main characters (University Professors and Assistant) in Robertson Davies's novel The Rebel Angels, part of the The Cornish Trilogy. His works are the focus of the main character, Maria Theotoky's Ph.D. thesis.
Milan Kundera in an article of January 8, 2007 in The New Yorker: "(Rabelais) is, along with Cervantes, the founder of an entire art, the art of the novel." (page 31). He speaks in the highest terms of Rabelais, calling him "the best", along with Flaubert.
