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

If it does nothing else, Robertson's Mock-Epic demonstrates that the old story of the disappearance of serious and competent epic in European literature in the eighteenth century (according to the longest definition of the period, 1670s-1840s) needs to be supplemented by a consciousness of just how widespread mock-epic was as a response to epic forms and ambitions. By putting together poems in English, French, and German, Robertson establishes an international tradition of deflection from epic norms, giving extended readings of Butler's Hudibras; Pope's Dunciad; Wolcot's ("Peter Pindar") Lousiad; Voltaire's La Henriade and La pucelle d'Orléans; Wieland's Idris und Zenide, Der neue Amadis, and Oberon; Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea; Ratschky's Melchior Striegel; Blumauer's Aeneid travesty; Parny's La guerre des dieux; Byron's Don Juan; and Heine's Atta Troll. His express aim is "to present a chapter in literary history that we nowadays perceive only partially, and, above all, to share with others the enjoyment that I have found in reading and exploring mock-epic." (13) This modest ambition is pursued in an old-fashioned way that has both enabling and limiting elements.

The genre as Robertson describes it has its roots as firmly in the sixteenth-century Italian romance/epics of Ariosto and Tasso as in the classical epics of Homer and Virgil. The fantastic elements of these works are shown to feed into an exotic strain in the mock-epics that classicism (at least according to its neoclassical theorists) cannot alone explain. And it is this exotic, even baroque, element that Robertson sees as animating mock-epic with an energy lacking in Enlightenment attempts at serious epic. The reflexivity built into mock-epic as a way of writing and thinking permits a kind of unauthorized thought and mannered representation that plays an intriguing part in the growth and spread of oppositional culture across Europe in the eighteenth century. The mockery brings ironic distance that permits antiauthoritarianism of differing political colors: both anticlericalism and skeptical hostility to revolutionary certainties. It also opens a path to the deflected and increasingly explicit eroticism of the period. With its classical models and ironic aesthetics of pleasure, mock-epic is presented as part of a secularizing story that runs through high culture in Europe from the Renaissance through to the end of the Napoleonic era, with Byron and Heine as the last and greatest figures. It creates a literary space for intellectual or aesthetic play that Robertson tries persistently to illuminate as he takes us through poems he argues we should read more, both for pleasure and their literary-historical significance.

He makes no attempt to dress up his accounts of the poems as either theoretically or socially urgent, and (more limitingly) the book is not unified by a persistently argued thesis. It is not even entirely chronological, with a discussion of Hudibras (1663) appearing between Goethe and Ratschky in the 1780s on the strength a comparison of responses to revolution. The literary criticism is supple but does not address a consistent set of issues concerning mock-epic, tending rather to wander wherever the poem leads the critic. While this is clearly faithful to Robertson's experience of poems that impress him, it risks making the book as a whole little more than the sum of its parts. Certainly it would be easier to read the book end to end if a more explicit narrative or set of theses could be kept before the reader. Also the particular scholarship on individual poems is uneven in its currency, so that the book sometimes provides capable synthesis of received opinion rather than novel interpretation. In practice, this makes the analyses of the less well known works more valuable than those of the more famous. It is good to have on record capable readings of Blumauer, Butler, and Parny but, by contrast, the discussion of Pope's Dunciad adds little of note to a...