Gargantua and Pantagruel

Gargantua and Pantagruel is a cycle of five satirical novels by the French writer François Rabelais, published in stages between roughly 1532 and 1564, with the story of the giant Pantagruel appearing first around 1532 and that of his father Gargantua following in 1534. The books follow the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel and their companions through wildly exaggerated adventures of battle, travel and appetite, combining broad physical comedy with dense wordplay, parody of scholastic learning and satire of religious and political authority. The work gave the English language the words gargantuan, for anything of enormous scale, and Pantagruelism, for a spirit of good-humored, cynically tolerant satire, and its combination of erudition and bawdy invention has led critics to compare Rabelais to Shakespeare and James Joyce. Its influence on English satire was felt early and lastingly, with later writers including Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne drawing directly on Rabelais's style.