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Using the figure of Pocahontas, America's first ethnic heroine, as a representative symbol in the cultural imagination of America, this volume examines American women's fiction in terms of gender and ethnicity. Dearborn discusses the problems of authenticity, authority, and genre that plague the ethnic female tradition, and analyzes the dominant themes that appear in American women's fiction--generational conflict, renunciation of one's ethnic origins, and intermarriage. She evaluates the writings of black, immigrant, and Jewish women from Our Nig by Mrs. H.E. Wilson, the first novel by a black woman, to the works of Gertrude Stein and Toni Morrison, and concludes that American women writers who take ethnicity as an integral part of the American identity can best portray what it is to be a woman and an outsider in the social fabric of America. ISBN 0-19-503632-8: $21.95.