Lost Plots

Exploring how early novels experimented with stories within stories, Katie Charles shows how interpolated tales confronted readers with an array of interpretive challenges. Considering the habitual nature of these interruptions by seemingly throwaway extra plots, she investigates why they persistently unnerve readers with the sense that they have 'lost the plot.' Taking the bold critical step of recognizing interpolated tales as a category worthy of analysis, she raises new and exciting questions around how these tales should be read and by what measure they might be said to 'count.' The peculiar literary history reconstructed here offers a key for assessing how various texts and readers think about who gets to speak and be heard, choices of particular import in the context of gender difference and its historical relation to public speech. Lost Plots argues that attending to this forgotten body of evidence opens up a new account of gendered speech and power.