When Pocahontas, America's first "ethnic" heroine, laid her head over John Smith's to save him from her father, she also unknowingly lay down certain themes that would permeate America's female ethnic literary tradition and culture from that moment on. Using the figure of Pocahontas as a representative symbol or story in the American cultural imagination, this is the first study to examine American women's fiction--from Our Nig by Mrs. H.E.W. Wilson,...