Mock-Epic Poetry from Voltaire to Heine

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I am writing a comparative study of mock epic in English, French, German, and (to a smaller extent) Italian poetry, focusing on the period 1750-1850. The epic poetry of Homer and Virgil was central to the standard educational curriculum and familiar also through translations. Parodies of epic existed even in ancient times (the parody of Homer, called the Battle of the Frogs and Mice, dates from the 5th century BC). This tradition fed into mock epic, along with the tradition of travesty (retelling epic narratives in humorously everyday terms) and the Italian romance epic of Ariosto which relied on adventure, irony and humour. As serious epic was increasingly felt to be an obsolete genre, mock epic became a way not of confirming but of undermining the cultural authority of epic. In the 18th century mock epic became an autonomous form of writing, only loosely related to the increasingly obsolete epic. Mock epic in this period comprises numerous poems, a few now canonical, most half-remembered or forgotten, which were widely read and enjoyed in their time and deserve to be recovered not just for scholars but for present-day readers. Canonical texts include Wieland's Oberon, Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea, Byron's Don Juan, Heine's Atta Troll; Voltaire's Pucelle has an ambiguous position as a little-read text by a major author. Others, such as Ratschky's Melchior Striegel and Parny's Guerre des dieux, are scarcely known and deserve to be recovered.Mock epic not only parodies epic but offers alternative values. While epic centres on war and national destiny, and its heroes place duty above love, mock epic celebrates love, the senses, and domestic life, and stresses the body rather than the soul. It sometimes responds satirically to contemporary events (notably the French Revolution), again confronting epic values with contemporary realities. Its emotional range varies from the sentimental to the scurrilous. It relies heavily on intertextual allusions to other works, which often need scholarly study if present-day readers are to appreciate them.In being comparative, the study will also bring out how much European literature was regarded, in the period concerned, as a unity; the division into national literatures was less important than it became in the age of nationalism, and familiarity with other literatures was assumed. Hence the influence of Ariosto, sometimes through translation, is almost omnipresent in mock epic, and English satire was widely read and influential in France, Germany and Austria. Mock epic was an international genre; our present-day preoccupation with national literatures prevents us from recognizing it as a distinct body of writing.Dissemination: I have begun discussing this book with Oxford University Press who are extremely interested in publishing it.