Mock-heroic, or mock-epic, works are typically satires or parodies that mock the elevated style of classical heroic literature, either by portraying a foolish character as a hero or by inflating a trivial subject with grandiose language. The earliest known example is the Batrachomyomachia, traditionally attributed to Homer, and the genre later flourished in seventeenth-century Italy and in post-Restoration and Augustan England through works such as Samuel Butler's Hudibras, John Dryden's Mac Flecknoe and Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad.
Facts
Notable ExampleLa secchia rapita (The Stolen Bucket) by Alessandro Tassoni (1622) 1 Defining TraitPuts a fool in the role of the hero or exaggerates the heroic qualities in relation to a trivial subject 1 Sources
1. Wikipedia: Mock-heroic
Italian mock-heroic works
La secchia rapita (The Stolen Bucket) by Alessandro Tassoni (1622)
Lead paragraph
put a fool in the role of the hero or exaggerate the heroic qualities in relation to a trivial subject
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