Rabelais's Carnival

"Kinser proposes a very persuasive post-Bakhtinian approach to Rabelais's novel and its relation to the carnival. His new historical epistemology, emphasizing as it does the genetic function of an archival 'metatext, ' is compatible with a sophisticated semiotic analysis of the Rabelaisian text. This is a timely, erudite and subtle book which bases its theoretical arguments on solid documentary and textual evidence."--Michel Beaujour, New York University