Bundles, trunks, magazines: storage, a perspectival description, and the generation of narrative

Although accounts of novelistic description have assumed that interior spaces are primarily spaces of habitation, another type of interior space dominates fiction pre-1800. This is a space of storage, which holds material objects in reserve and keeps them at hand for human characters, instead of arranging persons and objects together as spaces of habitation do. Spaces of storage, such as bundles, trunks, magazines, and other containers, have their contents represented aperspectivally, via enumeration rather than spatially situated description. In picaresque fiction and early 18,h-century English novels such as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Colonel Jack, as well as Samuel Richardson's Pamela, these bundled objects generate narrative rather than furnishing a setting for human action.
Via a common slippage, we assume that interior spaces are domestic spaces. Thus, Gaston Bachelard opens The Poetics of Space with a series of images that equate 'inside space, in [...]