IV.

The Mock Epic

A type of epic derived from the serious epic is the mock epic, which satirizes contemporary ideas or conditions in a form and style burlesquing the serious epic. Among noted mock epics is The Rape of the Lock (1712) by the English poet Alexander Pope. Several novels also fall into this category, among them such works as Joseph Andrews (1742), described by its author, the English novelist Henry Fielding, as “a comic epic ... in prose”.