The Ideal in Nineteenth-Century Botany and Art: Literary Realism as Idealism of Plot

Abstract: Beginning in the 1850s, prominent Victorian literary critics drew on uses of the "ideal" in botany to theorize epistemic uses of the "ideal" in the arts. In doing so, they not only explored the epistemic functions of art—thereby arguing for the ideal on the same grounds on which other literary critics argued for the nearly opposite commercial logic of the "fair sample" (for instance, Senior 240)—but also developed a distinctive theory of the artistic imagination, asserted a homology between the unities created by artists and by scientists, and overturned the old literary logic of the humors. By the 1870s, this framework of the "ideal" was subtly shifting from being a logic of literary character to being a logic of plot, implicitly redefining literary realism as idealism of plot.