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!
The sparkling waters around the tropical island of Malau attracts surfers, fisherman, and tourists from all around the world. Now they've attracted something else. Something big...and incredibly dangerous. It begins with an earthquake, and the mysterious deaths of two young women. Local authorities are baffled by the tragedy, until a visiting American scientist realizes that the tremors have driven an unknown creature up from the ocean depths..and there may be more than one. Soon the entire island will tremble beneath the thunderous tread of a gigantic mutated behemoth, the likes of which the world has never seen. No warning, no scientific theory can prepare mankind for the awesome reality of...Gargantua.
Rabelais’s tale the giant prince Gargantua is a vast and inescapable cluster of qualities and activities; his violence, greed and incontinence are incomparable. In the old giant’s size, ubiquity, gluttony, vast knowledge and warlike nature, we can recognize qualities of our contemporary culture. In this brilliant polemic on our visual mass culture, Stallabrass argues that culture’s status as a commodity is the most important thing about it, affecting its form, its relation to the viewer and its ideology. The great diversity of choice masks the extent to which this choice is managed by an ever-shrinking number of powerful owners. Stallabrass shows how the consistent and unifying capitalist ideology of mass culture leads to an increasingly homogeneous identity among its consumers. Even in marginal and radical cultural activities, like graffiti writing, can be found the tyranny of the brand name and the reduction of the individual to a cipher. Starting with an analysis of subjects which concern specific groups—amateur photography, computer games and cyberspace—Stallabrass works out to wider aspects of the culture which affect everybody, including cars, shopping and television. Gargantua raises profound questions about the nature and direction of mass culture. It also raises a challenge to the postmodern theorists’ adherence to subjectivity, indeterminacy and political indifference. If manufactured subjectivities are always shot through with the objective, then their plurality may not be merely a colourful but meaningless postmodern smorgasbord, but rather the accurate reflection of our current cultural situation, and a map showing paths beyond it.
As a companion volume to Pantagruel, this new edition of Gargantua continues Rabelais’ acclaimed fantasy of a mythical family of giants. Gargantua introduces Pantagruel’s father—another wondrous giant. As he tells Gargantua’s life story from his birth and education to his later life, Rabelais uses the events of the giant’s life to parody medieval and classical learning, mock traditional ecclesiastical authority, and proffer his own thoughts on humanism and society. Marked with the same warm humor, obsession with food, and scatological wit of Pantagruel, Gargantua is a further striking burlesque on Rabelais’ contemporaries and a glorious outpouring of Renaissance plenitude.
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.
"The dazzling and exuberant comic 'Chronicles' of Rabelais (c. 1483-1552) are a feast of wisdom and laughter. Realism intertwines with carnivalesque fantasy, Renaissance learning with obscene humour to make readers look at the world afresh. Pantagruel, a tale of comic chivalry, satirizes lawyers, theologians and academic buffoons, while Gargantua mocks rash generals, idiotic monarchs and uncouth professors. It champions freedom and laughs at a dirty young giant before he turns into a splendid prince. Sequels lead into more complex and daring laughter and high mythology, often at the expense of Panurge - the mad, word-spinning companion of Pantagruel (who becomes a giant in wisdom, a Renaissance Socrates)." "M. A. Screech's translation captures Rabelais' ingenious wordplay and mastery of language. The introduction explores his individuality while comparing him to Shakespeare, and presents each book to open up the new horizons of Renaissance Europe. This edition also includes a chronology and notes."--BOOK JACKET.
