Bloom

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 details 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.

• 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