Limited Access

A recurrent trope in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British fiction compares reading to traveling and the pleasures of novels to the joys of a carriage journey. Kyoko Takanashi points to how these narratives also draw attention to the limits of access often experienced in travel, and she demonstrates the ways in which the realist novel, too, is marked by issues of access both symbolic and material.

Limited Access draws on multiple disciplines to elucidate a history of realism concerned with the inclusivity of readers. Takanashi shows how novelists employed metaphors of transport to constantly reassess what readers could and could not access, a conceit that became part of the rise of the novel and the history of realism in heretofore unrecognized ways.