Confronting some of the most heated issues in the literary academy, Harold Fromm charges that the critical practices dominating the liberal arts over the past two decades have subordinated literature to unethical ends. In the hand of some feminists, Marxists, new historicists, African-Americanists and others, Fromm says, literature is a commodity over which exclusive, self-aggrandizing interests are struggling for monopolistic control. Beneath an aura of revolutionary virtue, these critics are as entrepreneurial and politically self-centred as the capitalistic and patriarchal systems they denounce. Their goal, says Fromm, is less often genuine reform than power and success in the academy.