Front cover image for The eighteenth-century mock-heroic poem

The eighteenth-century mock-heroic poem

Mock-heroic poetry is one of the most characteristic genres of English neoclassicism in the eighteenth century, including not only masterpieces such as Pope's The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad, but also numerous minor poems. This book is the first comprehensive study of the theory, the conventions, and the history of the mock-heroic genre. Broich first shows how mock-heroic poetry combines the characteristics of various discourses--epic, comedy, parody, satire, and occasional poetry. Later, he traces the history of mock-heroic poetry: its foreign sources, its beginnings in England, the "rivalry" with other forms of comic narrative, and its decline in the second half of the eighteenth century. -- Publisher's webswite
Print Book, English, 1990
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990
Criticism, interpretation, etc
xiv, 234 pages ; 24 cm
9780521309653, 0521309654
19512216
Part I. The conventions of the mock-heroic poem. 1. The presentation of contemporary reality
2. The disguise and suspension of reality
3. Imitation and parody of the epic
4. The mock-heroic poem as satire
Part II. The history of the mock-heroic poem. 5. Different types of mock-heroic poem and their pre-neoclassical models
6. Boileau's 'Le Lutrin' and the first phase of the genre's development in England (c. 1681-c. 1712)
7. Pope's 'The rape of the lock'
8. The 'rape of the lock' and the heroi-comical poem (second phase, c. 1714-c. 1742)
9. Pope's 'Dunciad'
10. The decline and fall of the mock-heroic poem (third phase, c. 1742-c. 1800)
Translation of: Studien zum komischen Epos
Translation of: Studien zum komischen Epos