"In this persuasive and well-documented study of the social and historical forces shaping the development of self, Petesch located the origins of modern Black literature in the nineteenth-century texts of black Americans, especially slave narratives, which differed remarkably from the literature of the dominant white culture."—Journal of Modern Literature
"[An] ambitious exploration of the emergence of modern African-American literature, in a climate of national racial hostility. Petesch's primary focus is the treatment, by writers of color, of the African-American 'self,' in its historical and its social contexts. Divided into two parts, A Spy in the Enemy's Country is a painstaking study, integrating historical scholarship with literary developments."—Studies in the Humanities
"A valuable study of the complex relationship between the literary production of major writers from the 1850s to the 1920s, on one hand, and the prevailing ideology, steeped in racism, those writers had to contend with…Taking into account recent developments in the social sciences, the author offers an eminently readable account of a literature of masking, racial ambivalence, and, in some cases, disappearance."—Michel J. Fabre