Gargantua and Pantagruel

Giants defecating, fornicating, getting drunk, and having a gay old time – does literature get any better than this? The answer is no, of course.

The fact that it was written by a French monk in the sixteenth century boggles the mind even further – he certainly got into his fair share of trouble for this masterpiece of the bawdy and grotesque. The novel’s anti-authoritarian ethos, its celebration of the carnivalesque, was later discoursed upon by Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World, one of the greatest works of literary criticism ever written.