The Script of Decadence: Essays on the Fictions of Flaubert and the Poetics of Romanticism

Eugenio Donato was a critic who played a seminal role in teaching Americans how to read post-structural theory. This collection of ten seminal essays is united by the themes of language and mortality. Here he first discusses Flaubert and then explores Romantic poetics. Donato examines the nature of Flaubert's work and his particularly "constructed" recapturing of history, natural history, and language in the essential isolation of authorship, and elucidates the way mortality circumscribes the act of self-writing. In the second half of the book, these "mortal" concerns and the uses of history, natural history, and the language of narrative return at various strata of an "archaeology" of Romanticism.

Eugenio Donato, late Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine.