Book contents
- Lost Plots
- Lost Plots
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 “Freckles,” “Blemishes,” and Other “Mistakes” of Form
- Chapter 2 Unfixed Authorship and Readymade Afterlives of The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality
- Chapter 3 Speech Patterns
- Chapter 4 Puny and Discardable
- Chapter 5 Mother Tongue
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 December 2025
Book contents
- Lost Plots
- Lost Plots
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 “Freckles,” “Blemishes,” and Other “Mistakes” of Form
- Chapter 2 Unfixed Authorship and Readymade Afterlives of The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality
- Chapter 3 Speech Patterns
- Chapter 4 Puny and Discardable
- Chapter 5 Mother Tongue
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Exploring how early novels experimented with stories-within-stories, Katie Charles shows how such 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.
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- Lost PlotsInterpolated Tales and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, pp. 1 - 34Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2026
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