(3) Richard Terry,
Mock-Heroic from Butler to Cowper: An English Genre and Discourse (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 1.
The Eighteenth-Century
Mock-Heroic. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
He suggests that Mandevillian economics and a
mock-heroic attitude surface in poems on luxury such as James Arbuckle's 'Snuff' and Cowper's The Task (the concurrent treatment of canonical and non-canonical texts is another strength of his study).
Mock-heroic, perfected by neo-classical writers such as Dryden and Pope, renders ordinary conduct in extraordinary terms, measures the subject on a grand scale, to mock pretensions or aspirations.
15 In which author's
mock-heroic poem does the Snark turn out to be a Boojum?
In one section, the speaker of this epic steals report cards, roasts lizards, and does "360s off the lip." A few phrases later, however, she addresses her readers with a clever,
mock-heroic salutation: "Come all ye Visigoths of Alaric / Huns of Attila, of the / Ostrogoths & Lombards, of hummingbird / & tigrillo." This layering is never symmetrical or organized.
From the brightly colored title cards and the quirky music to the picaresque flow of its narrative, Idaho is a delightful and funny film, and Van Sant's appropriation of Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Henry the IV adds a an almost
mock-heroic sensibility to the enterprise.
Born in New Jersey, Smithson made a name for himself in New York circles while still in his 20s, with art that was at once scientific, deadpan, and bleak, such as his
mock-heroic photo series, "The Monuments of Passaic." But like the others who converged in the Earth Art movement, Smithson wanted to work on a larger scale.
Reporters participate enthusiastically in the traffic and call it "news." The process is sustained only because everyone can rely on the journalists'
mock-heroic code of omerta: Never reveal the names of your secret sources--never--even if the revealed "information" turns out to be spurious.
mock-heroic 'Say Heav'n-born Muse' in its first printing
Ulrich von Hutten, "one of the most satirical members of one of Germany's most satirical generations," [127] is indebted to Lucian's Charon in his satire Phalarismus and his Marcus heroicum is a
mock-heroic satire with Venice personified as a megalomaniacal toad, an image he repeats in his satirical epigrams that include France portrayed as a cock (gallus).
This hyperbolic depiction of his childhood reduces the subject to "mere parable." But this is not innate to the subject itself; rather, his high-flown,
mock-heroic treatment of the subject relegates it to this status.
