Victorian Renovations of the Novel: Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of Representation

KEEN, SUZANNE. Victorian Renovations of the Novel: Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 242 pp. $54.95.

In Victorian Renovations of the Novel, Suzanne Keen emphasizes the dynamic tensions between novelists' representational strategies and the Victorian conventions that shaped them. The study's inclusion of contemporary critical responses to "irregular" or "improbable" episodes in otherwise realistic novels restores the productive debate that, she argues, encouraged rather than restricted narrative development and innovation. Keen identifies these unusual forays of the novel as "annexes," a term which draws crucial attention to Victorian culture's immersion in spatial language and metaphors. Like the architectural addition to a home or building, the narrative annex serves as both an extension of the novel's main storyline and as an alternative workspace where writers explore the border regions of sexuality and gender, irrationality and madness, the disenfranchised and the abandoned. Annexes are identified by "a combined shift in genre and setting" that marks a significant departure from the novel's fictional world. As Keen defines them, these supplemental spaces "work by interrupting the norms of a story's world, temporarily replacing these norms, and carrying the reader, the perceiving and reporting characters, and the plot line across a boundary and through an altered, particular, and briefly realized zone of difference" (1). The author explores these zones of difference in readings of Anthony Trollope, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Kingsley, Thomas Hardy...