The Design of Rabelais’s "Quart Livre de Pantagruel"

This is the third and final volume of a series of books devoted to design of Rabelais's Pantagrueline epics. It completes the project begun in The Design of Rabelais's Pantagruel and continued in The Design of Rabelais's Tiers Livre de Pantagruel. Its subject is Rabelais's complete work, the last of the three epics of wich Pantagruel is the hero. As in the two preceding books, the purpose here has been to discover the coherence of both form and meaning in a work usually assumed to be fragmentary, disjoined, ambiguous and perhaps even ininterpretable: New discoveries, from the author, have been incorporated into the original manuscipt and several passages have been revised to assure a greater continuity between this volume and its now-completed companions. In all other respects, this book remains faithful to its original conception and form.