In the monograph Floral Images in the French Literature of the 19th Century (2017), Svetlana Gorbovskaya chooses a reasonable theoretical strategy of the analysis of an original art text as discourse. She finds floral text phenomena in the poetry and prose of the French literature of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries in their interrelation and integrity, reveals the dialogical nature of this mobile, semantically developing structure. Features of original texts within this approach are not lost, and the literary translation in the citations does not obscure the play of sense and shows the essence of the system of images, in our case, of floral images. Scholarly treatises, poems, texts of novels belong to literary artists of the period of Classicism, the age of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, schools of "l'art pour l'art", and Symbolism. Modification of a floral image depends on both the aesthetics of the literary direction and the biographic features of the creative personality of the writer: Gorbovskaya considers all this in her book. In the "Introduction", the author determines different aesthetic content of floral images depending on the historical and cultural period of French literature development. In the research, she analyzes in detail the poetics of "Baroque", "Parnassus" or romantic figurativeness. Gorbovskaya examines the development of the floral image in French literature combining the discursive and culture-historical approaches. She offers a systematization of floral images created by the French authors throughout the 19th century. The images are divided into two big formal categories: hyperonymic (flowers, trees, bushes, etc.), these are abstract floral images, which are often used with an epithet or a definition, and hyponymic (a rose, a lily, an oak, a hawthorn, etc.), these are floral images with a specific meaning. Another classification of floral images based on the perception level (by the author or by the reader) is offered: connotative (specific associations), associative (more abstract associations) and suggestive (extremely subjective level of perceiving a floral image). The basic advantage of the book is its focus on the analysis of texts: the author demonstrates a highly professional, virtuoso ability to define semantic specifics. She proceeds from immanent properties of the text, conditions of its emergence, and its influence on/interaction with other texts. Gorbovskaya repeatedly addresses the aesthetic and philosophical bases of "floral imagery" of this or that writer and the literary direction in the dynamics of their interaction. The dialogical nature of the texts in the book allows considering the floral image as a link in creating the metatext of the floral poetics of the 19th-century French literature. In her work, Gorbovskaya succeeds in conducting a conceptual research of the poetics of the floral image, and not writing separate essays on different writers' and poets' use of phytonyms.
