Conversation so far:
Is Rabelais and His World: carnival and grostesque the name of a book by Mikhail Bakhtin?
Rabelais and His World is the title of Mikhail Bakhtin's dissertation on the French Renaissance writer François Rabelais.

Question: What was this book about?
Self-contained rewrite: What was Mikhail Bakhtin's dissertation Rabelais and His World about?