Jane Lim

Although Asian Americans and women tend to be relatively well represented in professional roles, they continue to be underrepresented in executive-level leadership positions. This paper examined a combination of factors believed to contribute to the shortage of Asian American and female leaders in organizations – in particular, descriptive and prescriptive stereotyping. Thus, the current study examined how participants responded to an Asian American or White, male or female applicant being consi

If John Locke established the self-enclosed, paternal household as the basis of a new liberal state that fosters self-governing individuals, this Enlightenment model of family unit is disrupted in gothic fiction that posits claustrophobic homes as the primary locus of terror. Yet in Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya, or The Moor (1806), the terrifying household is curiously absent. Instead, Zofloya opens up the home, inviting nonmembers to enter and prompting family members to disseminate. It is precise

This article investigates Roxana’s turbulent national performance by attending to the relationship between Turkishness and Englishness expressed through the protagonist’s two names, “Roxana” and “Mother.” Arguing that Roxana’s impulse for cultural masquerade originates from her nebulous national heritage, this paper examines how the name “Roxana” generates vexing questions about the protagonist’s sense of social belonging. Specifically, I examine how Roxana’s political performance finds its m

This paper reads the racial blanching of Imoinda, Aphra Behn’s African heroine, in Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko as a performance based on cultural forgetting, to use Joseph Roach’s term. Specifically, Southerne’s play manifests the association of female virtue and white Englishness as a carefully constructed cultural legacy resting on Transatlantic crossing. Seven years after Behn published her novella, Southerne wrote a dramatic adaptation in which Imoinda turns into a white European woman. By r

This paper reads the marriage plot of Susanna Centlivre’s comedy The Busybody (1709) and Eliza Haywood’s amatory fiction The Distress’d Orphan, or Love in a Madhouse (1726) to investigate the vexed question of women’s legal right over property, marriage, and self-governance in early modern England. Specifically, the female protagonists of Centlivre and Haywood attempt to reconcile the right to property and self-ownership by commanding their father’s inheritance but defying the rule of the father

Written as an Oriental captivity narrative in which the European protagonists are held hostage by Muslim authorities, Penelope Aubin’s The Noble Slaves(1722) presents the struggle of white slaves pitted against a disparate world of religious and sexual assaults. Recent critics, focusing on the novel’s use of the captives’ distressed body, attempt to label Aubin either as a conformist to conventional gender ideology or a renegade who outlaws sexual normativity. Yet the gender dynamics of Aubin’s

This paper reads Eliza Haywood’s The Adventures of Eovaai (1736) as a proto-Gothic fiction that terrorizes female desire in its sexual, political, and social form. Written as an Oriental tale, Eovaai shares strikingly similar tropes and sentiments with Gothic fiction, anticipating the rise of “Oriental Gothic” that puts the female body on the cusp of despotic violence. Indeed, Gothic and Oriental romance share similar thematic, narratological, and rhetorical concerns that help update English tho

Smallpox, an endemic famously dubbed the “speckled monster” because it left scarring and pigmentation on the skin, pervaded the literary imagination of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. In 1716, a year after she recovered from smallpox, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote “Satturday: The Smallpox” as part of a series of Town Eclogues that probe the cultural condition of fashionable women. This paper attends to Montagu’s response to eighteenth-century “poxed” women whose diseased and disfi

This article examines the deformed female bodies in Aphra Behn’s The Dumb Virgin: or, The Force of Imagination (1698) as discursive sites through which female authorship, linguistic performance, and reproduction are negotiated. While critical attention has largely focused on the gendered and defective bodies of the two female protagonists, few scholars have examined how the sisters’ linguistic authority, or their distance from normative speech, shapes the female narrator’s (re)production of word

This paper examines Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790) to explore the complexities of imagination, terror, and language, or the lack of linguistic register through moments of pauses, suspensions, and silence. Particularly, I attend to moments of silence as recesses that reflect the character’s unspoken velocity of emotions; silence articulates moments of temporal liminality that linger between past and present, memory and reality, speech and acoustic impasse. By examining what I term “aff