Irony and Ideology in Rabelais: Structures of Subversion

Over the past two decades since the appearance in the West of Mikhail Bakhtin's study of Rabelais and popular culture, Rabelais's work has been a focus of debate in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. The subjects under discussion include questions of fixed authorial meaning and intention versus open and changing readings, and the competing claims of literary history as traditionally practised versus dialectical criticism, according to which criticism itself is not outside ideolog...