Richard Terry, Mock-Heroic from Butler to Cowper: An English Genre and Discourse. Pp. vii + 216 (Studies in Early Modern English Literature). Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. £45.00 (ISBN 0 7546 0623 6).

Abstract

THE objective of this series, Studies in Early Modern English Literature, is to examine individuals, trends, and channels of influence during the period between the Renaissance and the coming of Romanticism. Terry's study of the mock-heroic admirably fulfills the task. Individual writers such as Butler, Blackmore, Pope, and Cowper are considered at length, along with a flock of other practitioners of the form. Developments in this odd genre over the long eighteenth century, and in particular how mock-heroic can be seen as distinct from a similar comic form of the day, travesty, are nicely traced and explained. Perhaps most impressively, Terry theorizes how the influence of the mock-heroic extends beyond the pursuit of the form itself to become a pattern of social discourse within the larger culture. For Terry, the mock-heroic ‘is neither one technique nor one effect: it encompasses a variety of authorial attitudes and tones. Indeed, it is something of the complex, protean nature of the phenomenon that this book attempts to show’ (3). Thus, we are not offered merely an annotated walking tour of the greatest mock-heroic hits of the period (e.g. MacFlecknoe or The Dunciad, although those works certainly are discussed). Nor does this study, unlike others of the genre, stop at 1750, when the form seems to die away. Terry follows mock-heroic tendencies through the late eighteenth century, where it is redefined ‘not as a satiric form but as a comic one’ (4).