The author traces the phenomenon of ascribing sentimental meaning to floral imagery from its beginnings in Napoleonic France through its later transformations in England and America. At the heart of the book is a depiction of what the three most important flower books from each of the countries divulge about the period and the respective cultures. Seaton shows that the language of flowers was not a single and universally understood correlation of flowers to meanings that men and women used to communicate in matters of love and romance. The language differs from book to book, country to country. To place the language of flowers in social and literary perspective, the author examines the nineteenth-century uses of flowers in everyday life and in ceremonies and rituals and provides a brief history of floral symbolism. She also discusses the sentimental flower book, a genre especially intended for female readers. Two especially valuable features of the book are its table of correlations of flowers and their meanings from different sourcebooks and its complete bibliography of language of flower titles. This book will appeal not only to scholars in Victorian studies and women's studies but also to art historians, book collectors, museum curators, historians of horticulture, and anyone interested in nineteenth-century popular culture.

The terms 'poetry' and 'realism' have a complex and often oppositional relationship in American literary histories of the postbellum period. The core narrative holds that 'realism', the major literary 'movement' of the era, developed apace in prose fiction, while poetry, stuck in a hopelessly idealist late-Romantic mode, languished and stagnated. Poetry is almost entirely absent from scholarship on American literary realism except as the emblem of realism's opposite: a desiccated genteel 'twilight of the poets.' Realist Poetics in American Culture, 1866-1900 refutes the familiar narrative of postbellum poetics as a scene of failure, and it recovers the active and variegated practices of a diverse array of realist poets across print culture. The triumph of the twilight tale in the twentieth century obscured, minimized, and flattened the many poetic discourses of the age, including but not limited to a significant body of realist poems currently missing from US literary histories. Excavating an extensive archive of realist poems, the volume offers a significant revision to the genre-exclusive story of realism and, by extension, to the very foundations of postbellum American literary history dating back to the earliest stages of the discipline.

Race mixture has played a formative role in the history of the Americas, from the western expansion of the United States to the political consolidation ofLatin America. This text examines 19th-century authors in the United States and Spanish America who struggled to give voice to contemporary dilemmas about interracial sexual and cultural mixing.