This thought-provoking study challenges current models of ethnic-studies criticism and analyses of 'ethnic' narrative subjectivity that emphasize the cultural politics of ethnic traditions. Examining African and Asian American women's poetics, it presents an alternative critical method that focuses on patterns of 'transcultural' and transnational heroine construction occurring as canonical nineteenth-century 'anglo' narratives of femininity inform, and twentieth-century American expressions of feminine identity. poetic qualities which involve surprising relationships between Anglo-American...

This powerful study reconceptualizes ideas of ethnic literature while investigating the construction of ethnic heroines, shifting the focus away from cultural politics and considering instead narrative or poetic qualities which involve surprising relationships between Anglo-American women's writing and fiction produced by Asian American and African American women authors.