The first extended examination into the structure of influence of Zora Neale Hurston's work on major black women writers, an idea that has been widely accepted, this book explores Hurston's impact on such authors as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Rita Dove, and Tracy K. Smith.

Focusing specifically on the concept of desire as a liberatory idiom and as the highest expression of self-consciousness and personhood, Chielozona Eze delves into the ethical and social assumptions of Hurston's aesthetics and feminist visions and their manifestations in the works of the black women writers who came after her.

Through philosophical conceptions of desire, and zoning in on Hurston's Their Eyes were Watching God and its protagonist Janie Crawford, Eze unlocks crucial conceptual and analytic trajectories regarding debates on freedom, personhood and Black feminism, and how such rich interiority appears in key works by Black women. Surveying fiction including The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, and The Color Purple, plays and poetry collections such as Life on Mars, The Body's Question The Yellow House on the Corner, Thomas and Beulah, this book is a remarkable intervention with important implications for our times.