ABSTRACT
This chapter describes Marilyn Butler's analysis by considering the relationship between Jane Austen's nostalgia in Sanditon and the discourse of nostalgia for England's dissolved monasteries. Butler's contention that Austen sympathizes with the "inherited organic community" threatened by the new resort receives added strength when we realize that Austen places Sanditon in opposition to the pre-Reformation sacred landscape. Austen links Sanditon to the discourse of nostalgia by comparing the resort unfavorably to the medieval pilgrimage sites which preceded it. If the chief investor and booster of the new Sanditon resort gets lost, one can have little faith that the pilgrimages undertaken by new visitors will yield any more promising results. The sense of a closed, familiar group or "circle" is antithetical to the spirit of pilgrimage, where the goal is alienation from the world. For Marilyn Butler and Brian Southam, Mrs. Parker's nostalgic looks back to her home express Austen's nostalgia for a world that is slipping away.
