In their book on women writers and the nineteenth-century literary imagination, Sandra M Gilbert and Susan Gubar revise Harold Bloom's model of literary precedence to make it applicable to the female writer. Bloom defines an author's inevitable dependence on tradition as necessarily anxious because writers deny obligation to precursors, they desire originality yet know that true originality is impossible to achieve. This explanation is based on a male paradigm that does not fit nineteenth-century women a woman writer had few precursors who resembled herself Gilbert and Gubar therefore posit that for the woman writer the "anxiety of influence" became a “primary anxiety of authorship". The nineteenth-century female writer's limited relationship to her mate malliterary predecessors and alienation from the male literary traditions led to her feelings of anxiety and isolation.

Both Blooms and Gilbert and Gubar's paradigms of anxiety and influence need further revision once we consider the contemporary woman author Virginia Woolf a twentieth-century novelist, speaks of literary influence on women writers as "thinking back through their mothers". The contemporary woman writer seeks her precursors with enthusiasm to enable her own enterprise.These theoretical perspectives are inadequate， however, when applied to Black women writers, for not only do they neglect the racial pressures experienced by these writers, but they also provide an adequate explanation of the contemporary Black woman writers debt to the oral storytelling that is her literary her at age. Since racial pressures forbade the learning of reading and writing.early Black women storytellers used their own voices to create narratives. The contemporary Black woman writer seeks out her precursors in order to restore the forgotten tradition of oral storytelling rather than to express anxiety about the obscuring of her originality.

A study of the relationship of Alice Walker, a contemporary Black writer, to Zora Neale Hurston, a Black female writer of the 1940s, clarifies the relationship of gender and race in a revised theory of literary influence. In numerous and diverse ways Walker proclaims Hurston her precursor and appears to find that precedence a source not of anxiety but of nurturance. Walker writes that if she were condemned to live on a desert island with only ten books, she would "unhesitatingly" choose as one Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God According to Walker, "there is not a book more important to me than this one". The liveliness of Janie Crawford, Hurston's Black heroine, gives rise to Walker's sense of her own resemblance to Janie, and a similar sense of shared life and knowledge makes Walker identify with Hurston as well Alice Walkers understanding of literary influence, then, appears not at all melancholy or anxiety-laden. Walker designates as her precursor an author of Black legend and Black female liberation, a woman who enables female possibility.