The watering place in Jane Austen's novels: Space, language, consumerism

Jane Austen's writings have traditionally been viewed as small-scaled, focusing almost exclusively on the country village. However, Austen regularly uses watering places---by which I mean both inland spas such as Bath and seaside resorts such as Brighton---to function as counterpoints to the country village throughout her texts. The watering place exerted a strong influence on the reading public of the time. Through medical literature, guide books, advertisements, and novels, readers became familiar with towns like Bath without visiting them, and vicariously experienced them as sites in which fashionable people mingled, tried to improve their health, and indulged in everything from good shopping and petty flirtation to illegal gambling and illicit romantic liaisons. This project layers theories of space, theories of language, and theories of consumer culture in order to re-think the characterization of Austen as a stationary or spatially-limited writer; explore how Austen draws on the watering place's rich and diverse associations; consider the texts' insights into location's effects on language and subjectivity; and show how watering places in particular present a setting in which characters can change and conventions can be negotiated. Exploring Austen's works in terms of space, language, and consumer society not only broadens our understanding of Austen's engagement with space, but also provides a model for understanding how subjectivity is shaped in dialogue with commercial spaces in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England.