Mock-Epic Poetry from Pope to Heine by Ritchie Robertson (review)

Standard reference works like The New Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms (1994) have long regarded the terms “Mock Epic, Mock Heroic” as essentially synonymous. In his striking new monograph Ritchie Robertson—known for earlier studies of Austrian literature, of German-Jewish literary relations, and of Heine and Kafka—sets out to uncouple the terms and to reserve “mock epic” for a group of poems written during the century spanning the years between the fourth book of Pope’s Dunciad (1742) and Heine’s Atta Troll (1847) and transcending the “mock heroic” from which they derive.

The introduction discusses several attributes that define the genre. Because its very name links it to the epic tradition “one of its defining features has to be intertextuality” (6), including satire on other writers and quotation. The Enlightenment background suggests an attitude of rationalism, including a dismissal of the marvelous as well as a more enlightened view of sexual relations and the position of women. The historical context also produces “a recurrent hostility to orthodox religion and its institutions” (10) as well as fresh attitudes toward the “Oriental” world.

The emergence of mock epic is conditioned by the fact that traditional epic, by the eighteenth century, had reached a point of stasis. It by no means disappeared, as attested by celebrated examples from Klopstock’s biblical epic Messias (1748–72) down to F. W. Weber’s Dreizehnlinden (1878), which traces the spread of Christianity among eighth-century Saxons. At the same time, many of its features were appropriated by the increasingly popular novel, while epic itself offered targets for parody. Robertson identifies two famous traits that became problematic: the anger of Homer’s Achilles, who was increasingly despised as an uncivilized brute; and the pietas of Virgil’s Aeneas, which prompts him to desert Dido in a manner perceived as inhumane by modern eyes (33–34). Writers critical of Homer and Virgil turned for their model to the Italian romance epic, and especially Ariosto’s enormously popular Orlando Furioso (1532), which deals frankly with sexual desire and uses irony to relativize any intrusion of the marvelous.

The mock heroic—which in the tradition of the fifth-century B.C.E. Batrachomyomachia (“Battle of the Frogs”) uses high language to elevate the lowly—enjoyed considerable success in such works as Tassoni’s La secchia rapita (1622), in which a stolen bucket precipitates a war; in Boileau’s Le Lutrin (1674), where a petty clerical squabble arises over a lectern; and Pope’s Rape of the Lock (1712–17), in which the stolen hair emblematizes Belinda’s chastity (58). Meanwhile, Scarron’s Virgile travesti (1648–51) provided the model for a wave of travesties from Cotton’s Scarronides or Virgil travestie (1664–65) to Marivaux’s Homère travesti (1715).

With The Dunciad Pope went beyond The Rape of the Lock, focusing his satire on such topics as contemporary philology, the commercialization of literature, and popular culture. Following Pope, English writers turned out over 200 mock epics with titles ending in -iad (99) and attacking, as did Cambridge in his Scribleriad, scholarly pedantry or, like Wolcot’s Lousiad, the snobbery of the Hanoverians. With La Pucelle (1730–62), which used the story of Jeanne d’Arc as a vehicle for his polemics against religion, Voltaire introduced the mock epic into France—a work that Robertson valiantly rehabilitates in an extended consideration. C. M. Wieland, looking back to Ariosto and the early Pope and, at the same time, across to Voltaire and the satirical Pope, moves from the more Quixotic narrative of his earlier Der neue Amadis to the parodistic domestication of the epic in Oberon and from humorous subversion to what Robertson calls “moral rearmament” (197).

Convinced that Goethe’s Herrmann und Dorothea has suffered from “one-dimensional readings” (229), Robertson exposes—with an extended digression on Goethe’s earlier and incomplete Achilleïs, Voss’s Luise, and the pastoral—profound dimensions of complexity in the poem, in which Homeric simplicity is...