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This thesis is concerned with a problem of literary history. It shows how the inscription of Baudelaire's sonnets in the field of literary discourse is inseparable from their inscription in the general context of mid-nineteenth century social discourse. Baudelaire's sonnets are first examined in terms of the French sonnet tradition, and seen to constitute a formal departure from the Classically defined sonnet. His sonnets are then considered against the background of the opposition of Classicism and Romanticism in order to show that they represented a synthesis of opposed poetic values. In Chapter 3, a close examination of the sonnets reveals a balance of formal, rhetorical, and thematic elements consistent with the synthetic tendencies identified earlier. The study of the poetics of Baudelaire's sonnets is followed by a review of his general aesthetic orientation. This review leads to the problem of the sonnets' relation to contemporary social discourse. By reading Baudelaire's sonnets in terms of the nineteenth-century discourse of progress, and in terms of Benjamin's theory of historical consciousness, I show that their aesthetics and Petrarchism, as well as their rhetorical and thematic features, had a definite counter-discursive significance.

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