Compte rendu publié dans Acta fabula (septembre 2019, vol.20, n°7) : Natalia Wawrzyniak, « Un bon vieux monde à l’envers »
Vincent Robert-Nicoud
The World Upside Down in 16th-Century French Literature and Visual Culture
Brill | Rodopi, collection "Faux Titre 426", 2018
EAN13 : 9789004381834
110 €
284 p.
PRÉSENTATION
In The World Upside Down in 16th Century French Literature and Visual Culture Vincent Robert-Nicoud offers an interdisciplinary account of the topos of the world upside down in early modern France. To call something ‘topsy-turvy’ in the sixteenth century is to label it as abnormal. The topos of the world upside down evokes a world in which everything is inside-out and out of bounds: fish live in trees, children rule over their parents, and rivers flow back to their source.
The world upside down proves to be key in understanding how the social, political, and religious turmoil of sixteenth-century France was represented and conceptualised, and allows us to explore the dark side of the Renaissance by unpacking one of its most prevalent metaphors.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: The Sixteenth-Century World Upside Down
I Adages, Paradoxes and Emblems
Erasmus’s Adages of Inversion
Paradoxes
Moral Emblems
Carnivalesque Emblems
Emblems of the Religious Wars
II Rabelais’s World Upside Down
Carnivalesque Rituals
Grotesque Body
Wisdom and Folly
III Religious Satire and Overturned Cooking Pots
The Cooking Pot Trope
Huguenot Satires
Rabelais’s Posthumous Tradition
Catholic Responses
IV Social and Cosmic Disorders
France as a World Upside Down
Millenarianism and Apocalypse
Monsters and Polemic
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index Nominum