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.
Author(s): Amy M. King
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 288
CONTENTS......Page 10
INTRODUCTION: The Girl and the Water Lily......Page 14
ONE: Linnaeus’s Blooms: The Birth of the Botanical Vernacular......Page 22
The Rise of Botanical Culture......Page 24
The Mechanics of the Botanical Vernacular......Page 30
Botanical Mimetics and the Novel......Page 40
The Eighteenth Century: Occluded Blooms......Page 45
Toward the Nineteenth Century: The Bloom Narrative......Page 54
TWO: Imaginative Literature and the Politics of Botany......Page 59
Botany’s Gendered Controversies......Page 61
Botanical Modesty: Edgeworth’s Belinda......Page 69
Botanical Poetry: Charlotte Smith and Erasmus Darwin......Page 74
THREE: Austen’s Physicalized Mimesis: Garden, Landscape,Marriageable Girl......Page 84
Lovers Walk: Burney’s Evelina and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice......Page 89
Improving Grounds, Improving Complexions......Page 100
Bloom: Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion......Page 114
FOUR: Eliot’s Vernaculars: Natural Objects and Revisionary Blooms......Page 143
Ossification: Midcentury Bloom in Dickens......Page 145
Revivification: Midcentury Bloom in Middlemarch and Adam Bede......Page 152
Organic Realism: Eliot and Natural History......Page 173
FIVE: Inside and Outside the Plot: Rewriting the Bloom Script in James......Page 198
The Critic and Bloom......Page 201
The Girl as Topic: Watch and Ward and The Awkward Age......Page 205
A Blooming Consciousness: The Portrait of a Lady......Page 212
Bloom’s Decadence: The Wings of the Dove and The Picture of Dorian Gray......Page 218
CODA: Later Bloomings: Molly’s Bloom......Page 232
NOTES......Page 238
B......Page 270
E......Page 272
J......Page 273
M......Page 274
S......Page 275
Z......Page 276
