Search Results

This chapter explores the relation of mock epic to earlier genres. It discusses Italian romance epic, especially Ariosto's Orlando furioso, showing how it represents sexual relations with more freedom than serious epic; the mock‐heroic tradition, going back to the Batrachomyomachia (once attributed to Homer) and ending with Pope's Rape of the Lock; and the travesty of epic, illustrated by Scarron's and Cotton's travesties of the Aeneid, and Marivaux's travesty of the Iliad. It ends by showing how literary theories that stressed the autonomy of the literary work rejected the intertextuality which is essential to mock epic.

As previous chapters have shown, it’s not so much that “The Idiot Boy” is simply comic and “The Thorn” simply tragic, but that each poem--like The Prelude itself--is a medley. For all the differences between the balladic and the blank-verse sides of Wordsworth, that he should find himself recalling both "The Idiot Boy" and "The Thorn" at the end of The Prelude raises some possibilities and questions. Can “the history of a Poet’s mind” continue the process of self-humoring in a new form? If so, what would the new form do to the process? This chapter considers the subterranean humor of Wordsworth's experimental epic by studying his debts to Pope, to mock-heroic and mock-epic forms, to Cowper, and to the pantomime.

This chapter investigates how Sarah Fielding develops the kind of writing that leads readers to engage with the novel in a mode of reading that is both immersed and reflective. It traces this project through Fielding’s comments on novel reading in her critical writings, her translation of Xenophon’s Memoirs of Socrates, and her own experimental metafiction in the 1750s (also in collaboration with Jane Collier). Fielding, it is shown, brings novel reading and its immersive qualities into conversation with the debates between the ancients and the moderns and the transhistorical perspectives arising from the mock-heroic mode. Also the theatre, and in particular Fielding’s engagement with Shakespeare, is shown to contribute to her bid to create the kind of novel that can both immerse readers and make them think.

The decade after the Restoration saw the publication of several important works and collections of verse. Samuel Butler’s mock-heroic Hudibras satirized the civil war conflict, and although Abraham Cowley’s reputation was at its height, he lamented in his Pindaric odes the lack of reward and recognition for his hardships in the service of the royal family in exile. Katherine Philips’s poems were printed without her consent, and she was preparing an authorized edition when she died from smallpox. John Milton published his epic poem Paradise Lost in 1667, divided in 1674 to form twelve books, followed by Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes in 1671.

This chapter assesses Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock. The two-canto The Rape of the Lock of 1712 had mythological machinery of an ordinary epic (or mock-heroic) sort—‘Now Jove suspends his golden Scales in Air’. But in the five-canto 1714 version, Pope greatly enlarged and individualized the machinery. Indeed, much of the poem’s effect is due to its Rosicrucian mythology. Yet John Dennis, the Critic himself, called it contemptible, in his Remarks on Mr Pope’s The Rape of the Lock. As often with Dennis’s admirably detailed criticism, even his formidable failures, compounded as they are by irascibility, help more than many other critics’ successes to define the context of Pope’s intentions. The chapter then explores the psychological machinery, moral machinery, and political machinery in The Rape of the Lock.