Desperate Storytelling

Library Journal

n states at the outset that the mock-heroic arises from the ``radical disjunction between the heroic pretentions of the protagonist and the actual banality of his world,'' and therefore transcends mere satire or parody. He then uses Cervantes's Don Quixote as a framework for examining the mock-heroic in subsequent writers: Stendhal, Byron, Kenneth Grahame, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, and Alphonse Daudet in the 19th century; and Joyce, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Nabokov, and Saul Bellow in more recent times. This meticulous work, which presupposes both a thorough knowledge of the writers examined and a solid grounding in the technical language of literary criticism, is for the serious student of literature.Charles E. Perry, Central Coll . Lib., Pella, Ia.