Mock-heroic poetry is one of the most characteristic genres of English neoclassicism in the eighteenth century, including not only masterpieces such as Pope's The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad, but also numerous minor poems. This book is the first comprehensive study of the theory, the conventions, and the history of the mock-heroic genre. Broich first shows how mock-heroic poetry combines the characteristics of various discourses--epic, comedy, parody, satire, and occasional poetry. Later, he traces the history of mock-heroic poetry: its foreign sources, its beginnings in England, the "rivalry" with other forms of comic narrative, and its decline in the second half of the eighteenth century.