The Nuttall Encyclopedia, for example, described belles-lettres as the "department of literature which implies literary culture and belongs to the domain of art, whatever the subject may be or the special form; it includes poetry, the drama, fiction, and criticism,"[1] while the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition describes it as "the more artistic and imaginative forms of literature, as poetry or romance, as opposed to more pedestrian and exact studies.
"[2] However, for many modern purposes, belles-lettres is used in a narrower sense to identify literary works that do not fall into other major categories, such as fiction, poetry or drama.
Thus, it would include essays, récits, published collections of speeches and letters, satirical and humorous writings, and other miscellaneous works.
A quote from Brian Sutton's article in Language and Learning Across the Disciplines, "Writing in the Disciplines, First-Year Composition, and the Research Paper", serves to illustrate the rhetoricians' opinion on this subject and their use of the term: Writing-in-the-disciplines adherents, well aware of the wide range of academic genres a first-year composition student may have to deal with in the future, are unlikely to force those students to venture so deeply into any one genre as to require slavish imitation.
Writing-in-the-disciplines adherents, unlike teachers of literature-as-composition, generally recognize the folly of forcing students to conform to the conventions of a discourse community they have no desire to join.In his Elements of Criticism, prominent Scottish belles-lettres rhetorician Lord Kames (1696–1782) says the aim of the belles-lettres movement is to "discover a foundation for reasoning upon the taste of an individual" and "design a science of rational criticism.