Mansfield Park is the most global novel in the Jane Austen oeuvre, not only because it openly exposes its connections to the terrestrial globe through the problematic Antigua estates of Sir Thomas Bertram, but also because of the worldly concerns of its heroine. Fanny is the only one interested in her uncle's business in Antigua, the other backdrop to the pre-eminently English country house. The domestic values that would be apotheosized in Victorian culture were coming into their own in the idea of home, a sanitized and civilized domestic interior distinct from the unruly and savage exterior. The very definition of the interior depended on a world outside, hence my adoption of Peter Sloterdijk's conception of “the world interior of capital” to chart my own reading of the newly interiorized home within the context of global colonial rule. This home would be enriched by the rich and exotic spoils of the “world” while remaining strictly separated from it. Conceptions of action, subjectivity, and freedom, all political markers of modernity, are inevitably transformed by what happens in the world of globalization. The contrast between the “strong, manly, spirited” efforts of the masculine versus her own “little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush” is more telling than one might think. Ivory travelled on the same ships as slaves in the triangular trade. My paper seeks to show how action is gendered and domesticated for the smooth functioning of the world interior of capital.

While the influence of Virginia Woolf's writing on Eudora Welty's fiction has been touched upon briefly, and occasionally fully examined, by several critics, no critical attention has been drawn to the two writers' highly similar creation of outsider characters. This essay proposes that Welty's portrayal of Miss Eckhart in her short story cycle The Golden Apples (1949) can be read as a response to Woolf's depiction of Miss Kilman in Mrs Dalloway (1925). Both characters are depicted as German spinster tutors who have an intense homoerotic desire for their pupils and are ostracized by society. Against the backdrop of the early 1920s, both texts let us take a glance at how an interwar society marginalizes an outsider in tandem with the rise of anti-German sentiment in England and the United States. Particularly, by comparing the two characters' outsiderness marked by their class, gender, sexuality, physicality, and ethnicity/nationality, this essay attempts to show how the two writers' treatment of them helps us configure the ways in which space intervenes in the (re)production of individual identities. While Miss Kilman's shopping excursion designates her as a lesbian flaneur and epitomizes the department store's function as a heterosexing, pseudo-public space, Miss Eckhart's piano recital represents her agency as an artist who works to transform domestic space into an alternative public sphere for children and women in a small town in rural Mississippi. A kinship between Woolf and Welty established through their similar characters encourages us not only to interrogate the position of outsiderness predicated upon the dialectics between difference and sameness, but to problematize normative, exclusive, and heterogeneous locales functioning in society.

The paper engages with several sets of questions regarding the representation of Asian women in the U.S. Recognizing that images of monolithically rendered Asian women are quite prevalent in both cultural and academic sites of the U.S., I turn to possible alternative stories of Asian women in translation as potential tools that disrupt the enduring stereotypes of Asian women. Briefly reviewing Chinese and Japanese women's literature in English anthologies published in the past three decades or so, the paper considers how the marker, Asian women as a term referring to Asian women located in Asia has been translated and consumed in the U.S. site. Then, the paper attempts a closer reading of two specific anthologies, Red is Not the Only Color, a collection of stories by Chinese female writers and Inside and Other Short Fiction by Japanese women writers. Without overlooking the problem involved in the term “alternative” or “new” used to introduce divergent voices of heterogeneous Asian women, the paper calls the attention to the importance of active critical interventions on the part of various scholars and translators involved in the field of cross cultural representation of Asia.

Virginia Woolf's The Waves (1931) embraces culturally unprivileged bodies, which are outside national ideals. The novel's espousal of such different bodies comes from Woolf's intention to undermine the athletic and superior bodies produced under the pedagogical terrain. Woolf recognized a range of schools in England as one primary site that caused great confines of male and female bodies. Bent on the destruction of standard bodies formulated in the schools, The Waves shows that both the boys' school and the girls' school are designed to tame individual bodies by means of physical education. While describing the pedagogical violence against individual bodies, The Waves also presents some disobedient characters who try to escape the schools. Instead of participating in athletic games supplied by the schools, they involve themselves in aesthetic activities that embody the imagination of bodily equality. To fathom the political aspects of The Waves, this article examines the novel's representation of the English schools that discipline male and female bodies with a particular emphasis on physical education. Turning to the aesthetic figures, the present discussion, in turn, explores how the characters' aesthetic performance can expand the possibility of espousing different bodies stigmatized as inferior or insignificant in society.

In Claudia Rankine's award-winning collage poem, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), I argue, the ongoing, inconclusive labor of registering and resisting racial and patriarchal hierarchies entails a complex formalism. The text, that is, asserts the persistence of what Caroline Levine calls “constraining forms” and makes insistent, lyrical appeals for the shaping of new, less harmful ones. To fully appreciate the political and ethical force of this modern-day, African-American lyric, I also contend, it is necessary to attend to the specifically literary dimensions of Rankine's formalism, the manner in which her figures, tropes, and other rhetorical devices simultaneously politicize and personalize poetics. Employing such techniques as a second-person poetic voice, intertextual engagement with the lyric tradition, shifting linguistic registers, and metafigurality, Citizen discloses the material, somatic imprints of microaggression and a history of racial oppression on the black “citizen.” This formalism, then, imaginatively exploits the forms that inevitably shape reality, and produce racist and sexist stereotypes, to generate affect and provoke reflection, a persuasive strategy for inducing readers, especially white ones, to relinquish pernicious myths of American innocence and literary dreams of transcendence.