Keen, Suzanne 1963-

PERSONAL:

Born April 10, 1963, in Bethlehem, PA; daughter of William P. (a professor of English) and Sally (a literacy tutor) Keen; married Francis MacDonnell (an historian), June 6, 1992; children: Jacob Whitcomb. Ethnicity: "Caucasian." Education: Brown University, A.B., 1984, A.M., 1986; Harvard University, M.A., 1987; Harvard University, Ph.D., 1990. Politics: Democrat. Religion: Episcopal.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of English, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, VA 24450. E-mail—skeen@wlu.edu.

CAREER:

Yale University, New Haven, CT, assistant professor of English, 1990-95; Washington and Lee University, Lexington, VA, 1995—, began as assistant professor, became Thomas H. Broadus Professor of English. Round Table Group, consultant, 2007—.

MEMBER:

Modern Language Association of America, Narrative Society, Thomas Hardy Association (vice president and officer, 1996—), Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Morse fellow, Yale University, 1993-94; Virginia Commission for the Arts fellow, 1997, John D. and Rose H. Jackson fellow, Beinecke Library, Yale University, 1999; National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, 1999-2000; British Council fellow, 2001; Outstanding Faculty Award, State Council for Higher Education for Virginia, 2008.

WRITINGS:

Victorian Renovations of the Novel: Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of Representation, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1998, reprinted, 2005.

Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction, University of Toronto Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2001.

Narrative Form, Palgrave Macmillan (New York, NY), 2003.

Milk Glass Mermaid (poems), Lewis Clark Press (Lewiston, ID), 2007.

Empathy and the Novel, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor to books by others; contributor of articles and reviews to periodicals, including Commonweal.

SIDELIGHTS:

Suzanne Keen is a professor of English whose research interests include the English novel, contemporary and Victorian literature, and narrative theory. A graduate of Brown and Harvard Universities, Keen has been associated with Washington and Lee University since 1995, where she became Thomas H. Broadus Professor of English. Keen's books include her first, Victorian Renovations of the Novel: Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of Representation, which has been reprinted.

Keen draws on the work of Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Charles Kingsley, and Anthony Trollope to show "how novelists use narrative detours to revise and extend the borders of representation in Victorian fiction," noted Michelle Sipe in Studies in the Novel. Sipe commented that the volume "is a compelling study of nineteenth-century literary forms and the politics of narrative which centralizes the dynamic relationship between prescriptive theories of the novel and the techniques novelists use to incorporate, as well as test, shared ideas about the boundaries of representation." Sipe added that Keen "successfully challenges the assumption that cultural prohibitions homogenized the Victorian novel and limited its engagement with social and political debates about gender, class, and nationality."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Archivaria, fall, 2002, review of Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction.

Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June, 2002, D.W. Madden, review of Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction, p. 1770.

Contemporary Literature, summer, 2003, "Casaubon Revamped: Contemporary Adventures in the Archive."

Journal of English and Germanic Philology, April, 2001, Pamela K. Gilbert, review of Victorian Renovations of the Novel: Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of Representation, p. 297.

Modern Fiction Studies, summer, 2004, Margaret Scanlan, review of Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction, pp. 501-503.

Modern Language Review, April, 2000, review of Victorian Renovations of the Novel, p. 474.

Nineteenth-Century Literature, June, 2000, Diana Maltz, review of Victorian Renovations of the Novel, p. 137.

Reference & Research Book News, May, 2002, review of Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction, p. 207.

Studies in the Novel, fall, 2002, Michelle Sipe, review of Victorian Renovations of the Novel, p. 359.

Times Literary Supplement, April 24, 1998, review of Victorian Renovations of the Novel, p. 26; July 23, 2004, Bharat Tandon, "Love among the Stacks," review of Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction, p. 31.