{"id":8616,"date":"2010-08-31T02:52:43","date_gmt":"2010-08-31T02:52:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=8616"},"modified":"2013-02-07T20:24:28","modified_gmt":"2013-02-07T20:24:28","slug":"the-silence-of-miss-lambe-sanditon-and-fictions-of-%e2%80%98race%e2%80%99-in-the-abolition-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=8616","title":{"rendered":"The Silence of Miss Lambe: Sanditon and Fictions of \u2018Race\u2019 in the Abolition Era"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Silence of Miss Lambe: Sanditon and Fictions of \u2018Race\u2019 in the Abolition Era<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Eighteenth-Century Fiction<\/a>
\nVolume 18, Issue 3<\/a> (Spring 2006)
\npages 329-353<\/p>\n

Sarah Salih<\/a><\/strong>, Professor of English
\nUniversity of Toronto<\/em><\/p>\n

Although it would be difficult to argue that Sanditon<\/a><\/em> (1817) is \u201chistorical\u201d in any immediately obvious sense, it is nonetheless clear that the social history of England is central to Jane Austen\u2019s<\/a> last, unfinished text. Critics appear to agree that the novel, which, as Warren Roberts<\/a> points out, was written during a period of social turbulence in England, reflects anxieties about the shift from one socio-economic structure to another. Once a fishing village and agricultural community, Sanditon<\/em> has been \u201cperverted\u201d into a resort, a \u201csandy town,\u201d where the sea is an exploitable resource and invalidism is a social activity engaged in by characters who are \u201curban, rootless, irresponsible and self-indulgent.\u201d As Tony Tanner<\/a> puts it, \u201c[Sanditon<\/em> is] a little parable of change\u2014supersession, supplanting, and substitution.\u201d These are certainly accurate characterizations, and yet the majority of the novel\u2019s commentators overlook what Edward Said would call its \u201cgeographical problematic,\u201d the fact that the seaside resort is dependent on economic resources from outside\u2014from other areas of England, and, it seems, from England\u2019s Caribbean colonies. I am referring to Miss Lambe, Austen\u2019s only \u201cbrown\u201d character\u2014so briefly invoked and so tantalizingly incomplete. Certainly, Miss Lambe does not take up much of Sanditon\u2019s eleven and a half chapters, and as my title suggests, she never utters a word. All the same, the characters\u2019 allusions to the \u201cWest India\u201d contingent, along with Miss Lambe\u2019s presence in the text, certainly warrant closer critical attention than they have hitherto received.<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Silence of Miss Lambe: Sanditon and Fictions of \u2018Race\u2019 in the Abolition Era Eighteenth-Century Fiction Volume 18, Issue 3 (Spring 2006) pages 329-353 Sarah Salih, Professor of English University of Toronto Although it would be difficult to argue that Sanditon (1817) is \u201chistorical\u201d in any immediately obvious sense, it is nonetheless clear that the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8,6940,10,25],"tags":[3689,3690,3691,238],"class_list":["post-8616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-slavery","category-uk","category-women","tag-eighteenth-century-fiction","tag-jane-austen","tag-sanditon","tag-sarah-salih"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8616\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}