Bloom The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel [Hardcover]

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.

The intricate cultural web linking nature, flowers, sex and marriage with the English novel is clearly drawn and persuasively developed....Bloomcombines 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

The intricate cultural web linking nature, flowers, sex and marriage with the English novel is clearly drawn and persuasively developed....Bloomcombines 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 Amy King'sBloomis that rarest of academic studies--a book which the Victorian reader would have enjoyed, and learned from, as much as we do. --John Sutherland, University College London

By bringing together human courtships and botanical systems, King pelÃs