| This dissertation advances a new literary history of mock-heroic. The arc it traces through the epic verse and heroic drama of the period from the Elizabethan military revolution, through the English Civil Wars and the Revolution of 1688, shows how the satire of military figures, a germinal presence even at the origins of Western epic, transforms heroic literature from within. Formal analysis provides a path to cultural history: critical moments of generic innovation arise under conditions of political and military upheaval, and in specific contexts of print or performance. The dissertation therefore frames the thematic treatment of war and of literary mode within the literary and public lives of my principal authors, including Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare, Milton, Davenant, and Dryden. I argue that the interdependence of epic praise and satiric blame is radical and, where mock-heroic has been customarily received as a separate tradition that evolved as a nostalgic, substitutive, or parodic response to epic, I reveal a lineage of internal features adapted to critique the logic of epic glory at a time when new military technologies and religious sensibilities were heightening the public and private suspicion of war-waging. Braggart soldiers who expose vice in martial commanders, doubled heroic and satiric plots, vocal and judgmental epic narrators, soliloquy from lower-class characters, and epics that eschew warfare, all exemplify shifts in literary structure that subject to irony received structures of state and military authority. Ultimately at stake are the nature of heroism, and the cultural politics of its representation. |
