Limited Access

Transport Metaphors and Realism in the British Novel, 1740–1860

Kyoko Takanashi

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780813947570
• eBook ISBN: 9780813947594
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A recurrent trope in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British fiction compares reading to traveling and asserts that the pleasures of novel-reading are similar to the joys of a carriage journey. Kyoko Takanashi points to how these narratives also, however, 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 media studies and the history of books and reading to bring to life a history of realism concerned with the inclusivity of readers. Examining works by Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Eliot, Takanashi shows how novelists employed metaphors of transport to constantly reassess what readers could and could not access. She gives serious attention to marginalized readers figured within the text, highlighting their importance and how writers were concerned about the "limited access" of readers to their novels. Discussions of transport allowed novelists to think about mediation, and, as this study shows, these concerns about access became part of the rise of the novel and the history of realism in a way that literary history has not yet recognized.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Transports of Reading
• 1 · Delivering Narrative to Consumer-Readers: Staging Inclusion in Fielding’s Tom Jones
• 2 · Noisy Vehicles and Oversensitive Readers: Miscommunicating Feeling in Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey and Smollett’s Humphry Clinker
• 3 · Local History for Distant Readers: Narrative Transmission in Scott’s The Tales of My Landlord
• 4 · Information Overload in Industrial Print Culture: Shortcuts to Knowledge in Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers
• 5 · The “Prae-railroadite” and the Railway Generation: Sharing Memories in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair
• Conclusion: George Eliot and Contingent Access to Literary History
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index