Mock-Epic Poetry from Pope to Heine

Ritchie Robertson was born in Nairn, Scotland. He studied at Edinburgh University and Oxford University; held posts at Lincoln College, Oxford (1979-84) and Downing College, Cambridge (1984-89) before being appointed to his present post as Fellow and Tutor in German at St John's College, Oxford, in 1989. He is co-editor of the yearbook Austrian Studies (1990-99), and has been Germanic editor of the Modern Language Review since 2000. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2004.

• Abbreviations ; Introduction ; 1. Epic: a genre in stasis? ; 2. Elements of mock epic ; 3. Pope's Dunciad and its Successors ; 4. Voltaire's La Pucelle ; 5. The Fairy Way of Writing: Wieland ; 6. Mock Epic Domesticated: Goethe's Herrmann und Dorothea ; 7. Puritans into Revolutionaries: Butler's Hudibras and Ratschky's Melchior Striegel ; 8. Heroes in their Underclothes: Blumauer's travesty of the Aeneid ; 9. Wars in Heaven: Parny's La Guerre des Dieux ; 10. Byron's Don Juan ; 11. The Last Mock Epic? Heine's Atta Troll ; 12. Epilogue ; Select Bibliography

Wonderful: lucid, intelligent, and wide-ranging... Mock-Epic Poetry: from Pope to Heine is unlike most academic studies, and that is a good thing. Because Robertson's frame of reference is so broad, he patiently builds up a portrait of each text, offering bibliographical and critical contexts before proceeding to analysis. This adds to the book's bulk, but makes it a pleasure to read - and it means that it will be accessible to students of English and Classics as well as Modern Languages. It has two outstanding qualities. First, it makes an eloquent case for the interconnectedness of European literatures in the later eighteenth century. Second, it reminds readers of the pleasures of intertextuality.