Sanditon: Austen's pre-post Waterloo

Abstract

Written in 1817 and not published until 1925, Austen's posthumously published novel fragment, Sanditon, has always enjoyed a privileged relation to temporal discontinuity. My essay re-examines the question of Austen and history by engaging Sanditon in relation to a historicity of participant-witnessing and productive anachronism. I take as my starting point a particularly rich example of one of those oblique, sparing, and, consequently, ironically overdetermined world-historical signifiers that inhabits Jane Austen's textual world - a passing reference to Waterloo by the Speculator, Mr Parker, which satirically marks the commodification of history and the new cultural obsolescence of Trafalg..