Mock-Heroic From Butler To Cowper—An English Genre And Discourse

Terry (English literature, U. of Sunderland, Britain) begins by recounting the rise of the mock-heroic form in 17th-century England, overviewing its main properties as understood by commentators of the time, and discussing its ambivalent relation to the epic and its rivalrous one to an alternative burlesque form. Then he focuses on a number of examples and themes, among them Butler's Hudibras, Blackmore and the low sublime, Pope's Rape of the Lock, the rhetoric of Augustan mockery, the case of Cowper, and laughter and ludicrous composition. He finds the mock-heroic to be the exemplary English Augustan genre, and argues that it inhabited other social discourses as well as literature. Annotation c2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Richard Terry is Reader in English Literature at the University of Sunderland, UK. He is the author of Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past 1660-1781 (2001), and has written numerous articles on the literary culture of the eighteenth century.