The celebrated French critic and thinker Charles de Saint-Evremond (1614-1703) spent much of his life in exile in London, where he wrote most of his major works. The letters in the present collection,
This book analyses the use of the crucial concept of 'taste' in the works of five major seventeenth-century French authors, Méré, SaintEvremond, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère and Boileau. It combines close readings of important texts with a thoroughgoing political analysis of seventeenth-century French society in terms of class and gender. Dr Moriarty shows that far from being timeless and universal, the term 'taste' is culture-specific, shifting according to the needs of a writer and his social group. The notion of 'taste' not only helped to shape a new dominant culture, but also registered the conflicts within that culture between a view of taste that presupposted the values of 'polite society' as an exclusive (though not necessarily aristocratic) group, and a view that stressed the value of the classical-humanist tradition as a source of standards ratified by a broader public. this study sheds light not only on the central concept, but also on the individual authors discussed and on
