In recent years the disciplines of literary studies and cultural studies have engaged in occasional hostilities but very rarely in productive engagement with each other's methodologies. Yet each offers a set of rich resources for the other in a period of disciplinary crisis across the humanities in general and within these two fields in particular. Literary studies brings a set of skills in the unpacking of figuratively complex texts and a theoretical flexibility which allows it to frame its object and its own activity as moments of its practice; cultural studies brings an urgent attention to the institutionally structured uses which constitute the social life of texts.