Carnival and Comedy: on Bakhtin's Misreading of Boccaccio

Bakhtin’s theory of carnival as it is developed in the two seminal studies Rabelais and his World and Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics has impacted on a variety of disciplines. Although essentially literary in conception, it claims a historical underpinning. Bakhtin’s fundamental premise is that carnival, understood as the ‘sum total of all diverse festivities, rituals and forms of a carnival type’, was a historical and cultural phenomenon of incalculable importance for the development of European comic narrative from classical antiquity onwards.