Bloom

Starting from the botanical crazes inspired by Linnaeus in the eighteenth century, and exploring the variations it spawnednatural history, landscape architecture, polemical battles over botany's pruriencethis 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 bl…