This book is the first comprehensive study of the theory, the conventions and the history of the mock-heroic genre. In the first part, Ulrich Broich shows how mock-heroic poetry combines the characteristics of various discourses - epic, comedy, parody, satire and occasional poetry. The second part traces the history of mock-heroic poetry.

The contributions in this volume are all related to one of Ulrich Broich's main fields of research and teaching, the way stories are told in the various literary genres. The papers range from Chaucer to 20th-century literature; they discuss poems, prologues, plays and novels, French philosophers and English sermons, the Anglo-Boer War and totalitarianism.

Volume 53

This book offers a critical re-examination of some important (and some lesser known) texts which are commonly labelled 'epyllia' in classical scholarship. It traces the history of the generic term 'epyllion' and sketches the literary and scholarly reception of these texts.

A study of eighteenth- and early nineteeenth-century poetry in English, French and German, focusing on the mock epic (from Pope's Dunciad to Byron's Don Juan) as a critique of serious epic poetry and also as a literary means of exploring a wide range of sexual and religious issues in a humorous style.

More than fifty specialists have contributed to this new edition of volume 2 of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. The design of the original work has established itself so firmly as a workable solution to the immense problems of analysis, articulation and coordination that it has been retained in all its essentials for the new edition. The task of the new contributors has been to revise and integrate the lists of 1940 and 1957, to add materials of the following decade, to correct and refine the bibliographical details already available, and to re-shape the whole according to a new series of conventions devised to give greater clarity and consistency to the entries.

Lother Hönnighausen's book examines the literature and the visual arts of English symbolism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Natascha Würzbach's 1981 study of the street ballad was the first to investigate a specific genre of popular literature which had previously been vastly neglected. Attention is focused on the social and cultural conditions which accompanied its development. It is also looked at as a literary form.

Professor Kohl's aim is to gain fresh insight into his literary and critical œuvre of Oscar Wilde. He analyses each of his works on the basis of a textually oriented interpretation, taking equal account of the biographical and intellectual contexts through the use of contradictions that Wilde show as individualism and convention.