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Mock-heroic
Mock-heroic, mock-epic or heroi-comic works are typically satires or parodies that mock the elevated style of common Classical stereotypes of heroes and heroic literature. Typically, mock-heroic works either put a fool in the role of the hero or exaggerate the heroic qualities in relation to a trivial subject.
Historically, the mock-heroic style was popular in 17th-century Italy, and in the post-Restoration and Augustan periods in Great Britain.
The earliest example of the form is the Batrachomyomachia ascribed to Homer by the Romans and parodying his work, but believed by most modern scholars to be the work of an anonymous poet in the time of Alexander the Great.
Among the new genres, closer to the modern feelings and proposing new ideals, the satirical literature was particularly effective in criticizing the old habits and values. Beside the Spanish picaresque novels and the French burlesque novel, in Italy flourished the poema eroicomico. In this country those who still wrote epic poems, following the rules set by Torquato Tasso in his work Discorsi del poema eroico (Discussions about the Epic Poems) and realized in his masterwork, the Jerusalem Delivered, were felt as antiquated. The new mock-heroic poem accepted the same metre, vocabulary, rhetoric of the epics. However, the new genre turned the old epic upside down about the meaning, setting the stories in more familiar situations, to ridiculize the traditional epics. In this context was created the parody of epic genre.
Lo scherno degli dèi (The Mockery of Gods) by Francesco Bracciolini, printed in 1618 is often regarded as the first Italian poema eroicomico.
However, the best known of the form is La secchia rapita (The Stolen Bucket) by Alessandro Tassoni (1622).
Other Italian mock-heroic poems were La Gigantea by Girolamo Amelonghi (1566), La moscheide by Giovanni Battista Lalli (1624), the Viaggio di Colonia (Travel to Cologne) by Antonio Abbondanti (1625), L'asino (The donkey) by Carlo de' Dottori (1652), La Troja rapita by Loreto Vittori (1662), Il Malmantile racquistato by Lorenzo Lippi (1688), La presa di San Miniato by Ippolito Neri (1764).
Also in Italian dialects were written mock-heroic poems. For example, in Neapolitan dialect the best known work of the form was La Vaiasseide by Giulio Cesare Cortese (1612). While in Romanesco Giovanni Camillo Peresio wrote Il maggio romanesco (1688), Giuseppe Berneri published Meo Patacca in 1695, and, finally, Benedetto Micheli printed La libbertà romana acquistata e defesa in 1765.
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Mock-heroic
Mock-heroic, mock-epic or heroi-comic works are typically satires or parodies that mock the elevated style of common Classical stereotypes of heroes and heroic literature. Typically, mock-heroic works either put a fool in the role of the hero or exaggerate the heroic qualities in relation to a trivial subject.
Historically, the mock-heroic style was popular in 17th-century Italy, and in the post-Restoration and Augustan periods in Great Britain.
The earliest example of the form is the Batrachomyomachia ascribed to Homer by the Romans and parodying his work, but believed by most modern scholars to be the work of an anonymous poet in the time of Alexander the Great.
Among the new genres, closer to the modern feelings and proposing new ideals, the satirical literature was particularly effective in criticizing the old habits and values. Beside the Spanish picaresque novels and the French burlesque novel, in Italy flourished the poema eroicomico. In this country those who still wrote epic poems, following the rules set by Torquato Tasso in his work Discorsi del poema eroico (Discussions about the Epic Poems) and realized in his masterwork, the Jerusalem Delivered, were felt as antiquated. The new mock-heroic poem accepted the same metre, vocabulary, rhetoric of the epics. However, the new genre turned the old epic upside down about the meaning, setting the stories in more familiar situations, to ridiculize the traditional epics. In this context was created the parody of epic genre.
Lo scherno degli dèi (The Mockery of Gods) by Francesco Bracciolini, printed in 1618 is often regarded as the first Italian poema eroicomico.
However, the best known of the form is La secchia rapita (The Stolen Bucket) by Alessandro Tassoni (1622).
Other Italian mock-heroic poems were La Gigantea by Girolamo Amelonghi (1566), La moscheide by Giovanni Battista Lalli (1624), the Viaggio di Colonia (Travel to Cologne) by Antonio Abbondanti (1625), L'asino (The donkey) by Carlo de' Dottori (1652), La Troja rapita by Loreto Vittori (1662), Il Malmantile racquistato by Lorenzo Lippi (1688), La presa di San Miniato by Ippolito Neri (1764).
Also in Italian dialects were written mock-heroic poems. For example, in Neapolitan dialect the best known work of the form was La Vaiasseide by Giulio Cesare Cortese (1612). While in Romanesco Giovanni Camillo Peresio wrote Il maggio romanesco (1688), Giuseppe Berneri published Meo Patacca in 1695, and, finally, Benedetto Micheli printed La libbertà romana acquistata e defesa in 1765.