Fifteen Jugglers, Five Believers: Literary Politics and the Poetics of American Social Movements

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 Nigh...