EBOOK Mock-Epic Poetry from Pope to Heine

This is a study of mock-epic poetry in English, French, and German from the 1720s        to the 1840s. While mock-heroic poetry is a parodistic counterpart to serious epic,        mock-epic poetry starts by parodying epic but moves on to much wider and richer        literary explorations; it relies heavily on intertextual allusion to other works, on        narratorial irony, on the sympathetic and sometimes libertine presentation of sexual        relatons, and on a range of satirical devices. It includes well-knowntexts (Pope's        Dunciad, Byron's Don Juan, Heine's Atta Troll) and others which are little known        (Ratschky's Melchior Striregel, Parny's La Guerre des Dieux). It owes a marked debt        to Italian romance epic (especially Ariosto). The study places these texts in the        literary context of the decline ofserious epic, which helped mock epic to flourish,        and of the 'Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes' which questioned the authority of        Homer's and Virgil's epics; and it relates their substance to contemporary debates        about questions of religion and gender.