This book addresses the central crisis in critical theory today: the attempts to theorize the subject as both a construct of discourse and a dialogical agent. In Theorising Textual Subjects, Meili Steele argues that it is possible to understand the postmodern subject as an active political agent. Steele argues that some of the most influential theories of agency fail to account for the ethical implications of the supposed contingency of all contexts. Through wide reference to leading political, philosophical and critical thinkers, this book maps new ways of confronting the problem of how politics and ethics are deployed in imaginative narratives.