Rabelais and the Social Order: An Essay in Cognitive Criticism

The first question concerns one of the greatest figures of world literature: François Rabelais. What do his sixteenth-century fictions communicate about the power relations that shape what social groups do (or refrain from doing) to each other--killing, wounding, dismembering, having sex with, feeding, depriving of food, protecting, healing, commanding, obeying, ruling, serving, honouring, swallowing, humiliating, scaring, and so on? The second question is more general: how does a literary writer communicate to readers (whether about relations between social groups or anything else), even to readers who are separated from the writer by vast swaths of time and place? By considering afresh the first question, the book contributes to recent cognitively inflected answers to the second. Part I provides a reading of the social order across all five books of the Rabelaisian fictional chronicles.