belles-lettres
/bɛlˈlɛtr(ə)
/ /bɛllɛtʀ/plural noun [also treated as singular]
Essays, particularly on literary and artistic criticism, written and read primarily for their aesthetic effect: he inspired me with the desire to restore writing on art to nineteenth century belles-lettres derogatory elegant dabbling in belles-lettres...
- 'With an Essay on Style' and 'Essays from the Guardian' encapsulate his engagement with Victorian periodical journalism and belles-lettres.
- We review both belles-lettres and nonfiction.
- Books of literate and entertaining essays on occasional topics - what used to be called belles-lettres - are no longer common, and that is a shame.
Derivatives
belletrism
- Thomas Sheridan's protests aside, elocution existed as a support to belletrism by legitimizing the rationale, by incorporating its logic into the realm of embodied performance.
- If elocution exists to treat delivery as such, we see in the continued tradition of belletrism a kind of bidden theory of delivery.
- The effect of assigning this kind of importance to the cultivation of taste through belletrism is twofold.
belletrist
- By that time, at the age of thirty-seven, he'd already achieved the status of Russia's leading young belletrist, his volumes of short stories published, praised and wreathed with awards, his career as a dramatist evolving.
- He shone as a belletrist whose engaging and accessible prose is always fun to read.
- It certainly wouldn't fit next to the writings of belletrist genres that resemble intellectual Rubik's cubes, nor is it pulp fiction or easy literature that carries the reader away from daily humdrum.
belletristic
/ adjective ...- If the old World's Classics had any introductions at all (most didn't) they were short belletristic effusions by writers such as Virginia Woolf or G. K. Chesterton.
- The interest of the time was not in belletristic fiction but in the free-flowing, highly intellectual critical essay, with its elements of autobiography and historical skepticism and its pointed illuminating aphorisms.
- The belletristic choices were at their behest, not mine, but I agreed to readings that I thought I could work with.
Origin
Mid 17th century: from French, literally 'fine letters'.