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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.59254 |
| Date | January 1989 |
| Creators | Brown, Douglas |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Comparative Literature Program.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001067980, proquestno: AAIMM63444, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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