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.