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According to the dominant literary critical tradition, the designation" domestic frontier romance" presents a contradiction in terms. Most accounts of American literary history proceed on the assumption that the cultural impulse behind the frontier romance opposes that responsible for domestic fiction.'Deliberately shaking off the conventions associated with the homebound novels of European middle-class women, American frontier fiction tells the story of racial warfare set on the line between settlement and wilderness. Gender and genre coalesce here in a familiar manner. The heart of the frontier romance is a masculine hero, neither genteel nor marriageable, who flees the settlement for the freedom of the" virgin land." Indeed, its story is often told as if the frontier novel itself were one of Mark Twain's late-nineteenth-century boy-heroes, turning its back on" sivilization" to" light out for the Territory"(Twain 362). As Leslie …