The script of decadence

Eugenio Donato, a critic who played a seminal role in teaching Americans how to read post-structural theory, is represented here in ten essential essays. The first five discuss the nature of Flaubert's work, while the second half of the book explores the poetics of Romanticism. The collection is united by the themes of language and mortality. Donato examines in particular Flaubert's "constructed" recapturing of history, natural history, and language. In showing how these phenomena occur in the essential isolation of authorship, Donato elucidates the way mortality circumscribes the act of self-writing. In the concluding essays, these "mortal" concerns are addressed once again in an attempt to reconstitute an "archaeology" of Romanticism.