Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel

by Amy King

Overview

Starting from the botanical crazes inspired by Linnaeus in the eighteenth century, and exploring the variations it spawned—natural history, landscape architecture, polemical battles over botany's prurience—this study offers a fresh, detailed reading of the courtship novel from Jane Austen to George Eliot and Henry James. By reanimating a cultural understanding of botany and sexuality that we have lost, it provides an entirely new and powerful account of the novel's role in scripting sexualized courtship, and illuminates how the novel and popular science together created a cultural figure, the blooming girl, that stood at the center of both fictional and scientific worlds.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195339093
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	06/25/2007
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	276
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 6.00(h) x 0.62(d)

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Girl and the Water Lily Chapter 1: Linnæus's Blooms: The Birth of the Botanical Vernacular The Rise of Botanical Culture The Mechanics of the Botanical Vernacular Botanical Mimetics and the Novel The Eighteenth Century: Occluded Blooms Towards the Nineteenth Century: The Bloom Narrative Chapter 2: Imaginative Literature and the Politics of Botany Botany's Gendered Controversies Botanical Modesty: Edgeworth's Belinda/Botanical Poetry: Charlotte Smith and Erasmus Darwin Chapter 3: Austen's Physicalized Mimesis: Garden, Landscape, Marriageable Girl Lovers Walk: Burney's Evelina and Austen's Pride and Prejudice/Improving Grounds, Improving Complexions Bloom: Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion Chapter 4: Eliot's Vernaculars: Natural Objects and Revisionary Blooms Ossification: Mid-Century Bloom in Dickens Revivification: Mid-Century Bloom in Middlemarch and Adam Bede Organic Realism: Eliot and Natural History Chapter 5: Inside and Outside the Plot: Rewriting the Bloom Script in James The Critic and Bloom The Girl as Topic: Watch and Ward and The Awkward Age A Blooming Consciousness: The Portrait of a Lady Bloom's Decadence: The Wings of the Dove and The Picture of Dorian Gray Coda: Later Bloomings: Molly's Bloom Notes

Editorial Reviews

"The intricate cultural web linking nature, flowers, sex and marriage with the English novel is clearly drawn and persuasively developed.... Bloom combines meticulous attention to the detail of cultural history and vigorous readings of nineteenth-century fiction with the breathless excitement of someone who has stumbled upon a story never previously told."—Times Literary Supplement

"A fascinating and unique thesis.... The volume represents a significant and meticulously documented contribution to the study of the interrelations between 19th-century science and literature."—Choice

"By bringing together human courtships and botanical systems, King persuasively demonstrates how writers were able to imbue fiction with sexuality, while still remaining perfectly decorous.... This is a study that not only illuminates how courtship narratives can be replete with sexual reference and yet still 'respectable,' but also perfectly demonstrates how the tracing of the implications of just one highly charged word brings out the inseparability of scientific and literary cultures."—Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

From the Publisher