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This dissertation examines how the comic grotesque is used to address the subject of war in selected prose. The Introduction reviews the essential ludicrous-fearful duality of the grotesque. "Comic Grotesque" refers to examples which emphasize the ludicrous. An organic link exists between the nature of war and the grotesque form. Part One deals with Renaissance selections. The first is the slaughter of the rebels in Sidney's Arcadia, which parodies epic-battle motifs. The princes dispatch the rebels in a series of gruesome and humorous portraits. Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller contains two grotesque battles. Jack wants to join the stronger side at the Marignano blood bath but soon flies off to the Munster uprising. Jack's grotesque similes and Rabelaisian vitality characterize him as a picaresque hero. Burton's tirade against war in The Anatomy of Melanchols exposes all the absurdities of war but with comic exaggeration. The tirade is part of the greater dilemma of not knowing whether to laugh with Democritus or cry with Heraclitus. To understand Burton's paradoxical view of war, the tirade must be seen within the context of the entire Anatomy. Part Two looks at eighteenth-century selections. The pettiness and horror of war are recurrent themes in Gulliver's Travels. Swift is particularly interested in the unreason of war engines and the perverse delight which men take in the spectacle of battle. Smollett's Roderick Random documents the military experiences of another picaresque hero who sees action in the War of Jenkins's Ear and the battle of Dettingen. Like Jack Wilton, Roderick only enlists in the army to support himself. Perhaps the most memorable comic grotesque statement on war comes in Sterne's Tristram Shandy. The bowling green diversion may be harmless play, but it is also tied to Marlborough's actual campaigns. Paradoxically, uncle Toby's war wound is an emblem of love. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

*text removed pages 111 and 125. / Monitorial schools became popular in nineteenth-century Britain. Under the panoptic control of a single master who was assisted by a cadre of specially selected pupils --monitors --these institutions responded, ostensibly, to the need to "educate" the underclass. I argue that rather than being concerned with the improvement of literacy, the promoters of these schools --The Reverend Andrew Bell, Joseph Lancaster and Matthew Davenport Hill, among others --were driven more by a desire to contain and manage a segment of the population that constituted a perceived threat to social order. The efficient management of the schools' populations demanded of their pupils an unrelenting self-discipline, a seemingly innocuous concept that carries within it chilling implications for the definition of an ideal subject. I refer throughout to the ''literature" of the nineteenth-century English monitorial school --its theoretical and pedagogical treatises, pictorial representations and accounts of educational experiments --and by using Michel Foucauh's theories of power, I determine the actual force relations that obtain there, defining precisely the nature of a discipline that operates, as Bell writes, ''through the agency of the scholars themselves". Having established the educational context out of which monitorial schools emerged, I proceed, in part one of the dissertation, to examine mainly the works of Joseph Lancaster and Matthew Davenport Hill By reference to their tracts, I show how the monitorialists used the emerging technologies ofdetention to create a subject population whose bodies became the point ofapplication not only of "education," but also a complex form ofsocio-political experimentation. In the second part I investigate the attraction for Samuel Taylor Coleridge ofThe Reverend Andrew Bell's monitorial theory, revealing that what some critics have seen as Coleridge's paradoxical attraction to monitorialism is, in fact, a confirmation ofhis own idealistic vision for England's social hierarchy. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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N/A / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

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