Abstract: A woman is courted by a charming man, only to discover that all along he was engaged to another woman. Another woman loses her friend's diamond necklace and takes on ruinous debt to secretly replace it, only to discover that all along the necklace was cheap costume jewelry. A man tries to help a young boy haunted by ghosts, only to discover that he himself was a ghost all along. Whether or not you recognize these scenarios as Jane Austen's novel Emma, Guy de Maupassant's short story "The Necklace" and M. Night Shyamalan's movie The Sixth Sense, twist narratives are so widespread that you no doubt recognize the device. The plot twist is a particularly artful surprise which retroactively transforms our understanding of what came before ("all along...!"). As such, the plot twist complicates standard scholarly ways of understanding reading, knowledge and time. For this LitShop I'd like to take you on a whirlwind tour of my work on the history and theory of plot twists. The project began life as my dissertation, and I'm now intending to transform it into a scholarly monograph, an accessible short book for non-academic readers and perhaps a podcast series. I'd value everyone's thoughts on […]