T. V. Reed urges an affiliation between literary theory and political action—and between political action and literary theory. What can the "new literary theory" learn from "new social movements," and what can social activists learn from poststructuralism, new historicism, feminist theory, and neomarxism?
 
In striking interpretations of texts in four different genres—James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, and the ecofeminist Women's Pentagon Actions of the early 1980s—Reed shows how reading literary texts for their political strategies and reading political movements as texts can help us overcome certain rhetorical traps that have undermined American efforts to combat racism, sexism, and economic inequality.