Introduced by Stephen Greenblatt. Translated by Professor M. A. Screech. Essay by Milan Kundera.
Illustrated by Gustave Doré.
Published by Folio Society, 2019. Limited to 500 copies of which this is number 280. Large set. Quarter-bound in goatskin leather with cloth sides blocked in gold foil on front and spine. 61 full-page engraved illustrations. 658 smaller engraved illustrations. Numerous ornamented initials throughout. Handmade cloth-bound slipcase printed in gold with designs by Doré. Gilded top edges. Ribbon markers. 1000 pages in total. 14¼ × 10¼in.
The Five Books of the Lives and Deeds of Gargantua and Pantagruel, often shortened to Gargantua and Pantagruel or the Cinq Livres (Five Books), is a pentalogy of novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais. It tells the adventures of two giants, Gargantua and his son Pantagruel. The work is written in an amusing, extravagant, and satirical vein, features much erudition, vulgarity, and wordplay, and is regularly compared with the works of William Shakespeare and James Joyce. Rabelais was a polyglot, and the work introduced "a great number of new and difficult words ... into the French language".
The work was stigmatised as obscene by the censors of the Collège de la Sorbonne. In a social climate of increasing religious oppression in the lead up to the French Wars of Religion, contemporaries treated it with suspicion and avoided mentioning it.
The characters of Gargantua and his son Pantagruel were not created by Rabelais but inspired by various folk tales which had been collated in the early sixteenth century into five different works, collectively referred to as the Gargantuan Chronicles, the most popular of which, Les Grandes et Inestimables Cronicques du grant et enorme geant Gargantua, Rabelais references in his prologue.
It is the origin of the word Pantagruelism, meaning "buffoonery or
coarse humor with a satirical or serious purpose"; and also gargantuan,
meaning "enormous".
CONDITION A very good clean set with no damage. Books clean throughout.