Kelly Marsh, on Plotting the Unnarrated in Austen, Wharton, and McEwan

Employing rhetorical and feminist approaches to the temporal and spatial dimensions of narrative, Marsh argues for the power of plot in communicating the unnarrated.  She traces unnarratable stories of women's sexual pleasure in Austen's Persuasion and Wharton's The House of Mirth, and analyzes the workings of intertexts--by nature unnarrated--in Wharton's novel and in Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth.  In each case, Marsh locates communication usually figured as occurring on a "deeper" level of the text within the plot itself.  

 

Kelly Marsh is an Associate Professor of English at Mississippi State and a regular at the Narrative Conference over the last ten years or so.  She's the author of The Submerged Plot and the Mother's Pleasure from Jane Austen to Arundhati Roy (OSU Press, 2016).