Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"
The Textual Effects of David Walker’s Appeal is a deeply researched study of the many ways that Walker’s
Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829; 1830) influenced Black and Indigenous writers from the 1830s to the 1850s. While scholars have long studied the rippling political effects of Walker’s incendiary publication, including the passage of antiliteracy laws and the censoring of abolitionist periodicals in southern states, this is the first study to focus on the works of print by writers of color who were directly influenced by Walker’s manifesto...Dinius does the field an important service by showing that the
Appeal was not a one-off publication written by a political fanatic but a deeply learned text invested in both the powers of Black self-education and intellectual inquiry and one that would become a touchstone for some of the most important activist texts of the antebellum period. In this way, Dinius offers a new political genealogy of nineteenth-century American literature." * Early American Literature *
"Marcy J. Dinius draws out a sophisticated theory of influence and revision through Walker’s
Appeal that is unmatched in the existing criticism. This is a field-changing work, and one that promises to have a long life in African American literary studies, book history, African American intellectual history, Black studies, and rhetorical criticism." * Derrick R. Spires, Cornell University *
