Les Liaisons dangereuses

Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons) is a famous French epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, first published in 1782.

Critical views

Wayland Young notes that most critics have viewed the work as "…a sort of celebration, or at least a neutral statement, of libertinism… pernicious and damnable… Almost everyone who has written about it has noted how perfunctory are the wages of sin…" He argues, however, that "…the mere analysis of libertinism… carried out by a novelist with such a prodigious command of his medium… was enough to condemn it and play a large part in its destruction." (Young, 1966, 246)

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