Comic Enlightenment

How the seventeenth-century translations of notoriously obscene tales by Rabelais shaped some of the great works of eighteenth-century English fiction

Fran§ois Rabelaisâs Gargantua and Pantagruelâ"loosely related tales of gluttonous, drunken giants and their fantastic adventuresâ"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 Gargantua and Pantagruel 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 Comic Enlightenment, Nicholas McDowell reconstructs the cultural and political contexts of Urquhart and Motteuxâs 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.

Challenging conventional accounts of the origins of the English novel, McDowell offers extensive new interpretations of landmark literary works of the eighteenth century, including Jonathan Swiftâs A Tale of a Tub and Gulliverâs Travels and Laurence Sterneâs Tristram Shandy. McDowellâs ambitious and sweeping account shows how the âRabelaisianâ became part of novelistic currency through the long history of translation and imitation of Rabelaisâs works.