ABSTRACT

The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics describes 'mockepic' and 'mock-heroic' as

We can isolate in this passage three main defining characteristics: mockheroic, though constituting a specific poetic kind, asserts itself as a compositional method across both poetry and prose; it is inherently a satiric form, intent on creating an effect of derision; and it works through the incongruity existing between a formal, heightened language and a trivial subject. What can be added to this, as indeed the encyclopedia entry does in its next sentence, is that this heightened treatment of a subject is generally created by the importation of the style and manner of epic poems. The definition of mock-heroic proposed by the Oxford Companion to English Literature accordingly runs: 'a satirical form that produces ridicule and humour by the presentation of low characters or trivial subjects in the lofty style of classical epic or heroic poems'.2