Word and Beauty: Rhetoric and Aesthetics in the Western Tradition

To question the notion of beauty today implies looking back to the Ancients in order to gauge the heritage and unity of Western culture, stemming from the thought of Cicero and running through the works of witnesses such as John of Salisbury, Erasmus, Fénelon, and Baudelaire.

This is the project of Alain Michel, professor at the Sorbonne and administrator of the Société des études latines, who develops in this book a history of beauty and literary forms, of rhetoric and poetics in particular.

At once a summary and a synoptic overview of Western aesthetics, *La parole et la beauté* helps us understand why, despite the blows of contemporary criticism, the idea of beauty retains its profound relevance.