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.

‘Written in a lively and accessible style, Lost Plots argues that the interpolated tale ought not to be regarded as an epiphenomenon – or ‘excrescence' – of the emergence of the novel after Cervantes, as contemporary and latter-day critics have seen it, but as an intrinsic part of the emergence of the form within the long-scale and uneven ‘oral-literate transition'. Charles reveals how the interpolated tale opens out alternative perspectives on primary narratives, subverting power-relations that saw print identified with masculinity and storytelling with the feminine and showing how the plurality of voice they afford extend to issues of race.'

Jon Mee - Professor of Eighteenth Century Studies, Department of English and Related Literatures, University of York

‘Charles' methods of collecting and characterizing inset tales are as clever as they are colorful: these are toe-stubbing plots, plain as the nose on a face and as readily overlooked. Deftly displaying the specific affordances of the tale-form, Charles brings into view a new archive, one that's been hiding in plain sight. But these archival findings prove to be something more: a problem for narratologists to reconsider and a recovery of interpolation as an importantly gender-freighted formal feature for feminist literary history.'

Brad Pasanek - Associate Professor of English, University of Virginia