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Carnivalesque

Satire and Mystery Fiction

The carnivalesque is a literary mode that subverts and liberates the assumptions of a dominant style or atmosphere through humor and chaos. It originated as the concept of carnival in Mikhail Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and was developed further in his Rabelais and His World. Bakhtin considered the French Renaissance author Francois Rabelais and the nineteenth-century Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky the primary examples of this carnivalization of literature.

Facts
Notable Example
Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais 1
Defining Trait
Subverts and liberates the assumptions of a dominant style or atmosphere through humor and chaos 1
Sources
1. Carnivalesque - Wikipedia
  • Lead paragraph
    François Rabelais, the French Renaissance author of
  • Carnival sense of the world
    subverts and liberates the assumptions of the dominant style or atmosphere through humor and chaos
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