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Any history of the French epic must be envisaged as that of the genre's engagement with historical times, following its purpose in the European tradition. A paradoxical history indeed, as the epic, while hailed as the pinnacle of literature in the 17th century, went through two successive and antagonistic periods of blossoming, both undervalued or even despised by literary history: the first wave consisted of parodies (notably the Virgile travesti); the second and immediately succeeding phase produced serious-minded historical epics. This phenomenon will be analyzed with the methods of sociocriticism, because it can only be understood in the light of the relationship between literature and the crisis of the Fronde, then with the hope raised by the victory of the King's faction and the accession to power of Louis XIV in the midst of a quarrel opposing ancients and moderns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism is presented of the book "Nouveaux mémoires sur l'état présent de la Chine" by Louis Lecomte. It offers observations of a French Jesuit, p. Louis Daniel Lecomte, sent to Peking in 1685, with five of his colleagues, as Mathematicians of the King, to meet Emperor Kangxi. It mentions that it highlights the apologist in Lecomte, struggling with the hostility of devotees of the metropolis, as well as its commitment to the sciences of nature and vision of true merit.

The article discusses the career of Pierre Perrault, one of the brothers of the 17th-century French Perrault family, focusing on his work as a literary critic. Perrault began his career in the field of law and also studied science, translation, and literary criticism, and it was during the last six years of his life that he focused on literary criticism. In 1674 he published a book on hydrology called "De l'origine des fontaines" (On the Origin of Fountains) which he dedicated to the Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens.