The grotesque body is a concept, or literary trope, put forward by Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin in his study of François Rabelais' work. The essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, the lowering of all that is abstract, spiritual, noble, and ideal to the material level. Through the use of the grotesque body in his novels, Rabelais related political conflicts to human anatomy. In this way, Rabelais used the concept as "a figure of unruly biological and social exchange".

It is by means of this information that Bakhtin pinpoints two important subtexts: the first is carnival (carnivalesque), and the second is grotesque realism (grotesque body). Thus, in Rabelais and His World Bakhtin studies the interaction between the social and the literary, as well as the meaning of the body.