The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel (The Franklin Library)

714 pp. Brown cloth binding with gilt decoration and gilt edges. Decorative endpapers. "The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel (French: La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel) is a pentalogy of novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais,[a] telling the adventures of two giants, Gargantua (/ɡɑːrˈɡæntjuə/ gar-GAN-tew-ə, French: [ɡaʁɡɑ̃tɥa]) and his son Pantagruel (/pænˈtæɡruɛl, -əl, ˌpæntəˈɡruːəl/ pan-TAG-roo-el, -⁠əl, PAN-tə-GROO-əl, French: [pɑ̃taɡʁyɛl]). 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.[1][2][3] Rabelais was a polyglot, and the work introduced "a great number of new and difficult words [...] into the French language".[4] The work was stigmatised as obscene by the censors of the Collège de la Sorbonne,[5] and, within a social climate of increasing religious oppression in a lead up to the French Wars of Religion, it was treated with suspicion, and contemporaries avoided mentioning it.[6] "Pantagruelism", a form of stoicism, developed and applied throughout, is (among other things) "a certain gaiety of spirit confected in disdain for fortuitous things"[7] (French: une certaine gaîté d'esprit confite dans le mépris des choses fortuites)."--Wikipedia