Idle Stories: Interpolated Tales and the Anglophone Novel, 1740–1800

From the earliest days of the novel, people have been threatening to kick interpolated tales out of it. Cervantes, Henry Fielding, and Walter Scott vilified interpolated tales as “foreign to the purpose,” “extravagant,” and “unnecessary,” yet their novels brim with such “idle stories.” Though interpolated tales are everywhere in eighteenth-century English novels, their function can be hard to hold in critical focus; as a concept, they elude us, and remain only loosely defined as “tales within a tale” or “twice-told tales.” While scholars have seized on these tales as a “site for critical performance” yielding scores of publications, this study is the first full-length work on the topic. “Idle Stories” explores the cultural value assigned to interpolated tales in a transatlantic range of novels by Sarah and Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Sarah Scott, Frances Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, William Earle, Jr., and the ever-present “Anonymous.” So often, interpolated tales are negatively or positively framed: they distract and mar or delight and beautify. I begin from the recognition that their bifurcated reception—their perseverating place in or out of the novel as a genre—constitutes a defining feature of the device. By operating as parts within the whole and as whole narratives in their own right, interpolated tales occur both in and potentially outside of the novels that contain them. Their partial assimilation makes for an awkward fit. However, it also allows these tales to mediate alternative perspectives without assimilating them fully into the primary narrative and its point of view. Set apart by an ironizable edge, interpolated tales are uniquely positioned to advance critiques of all kinds, whether of the primary narrative or of traditional ways of conceptualizing subject categories like gender, race, class, and the individual self. Thus, interpolated tales play a crucial role in the construction of subjectivity and difference as well as in the emergence of the novel.