Literacy: References & Edit History

Accounts of the nature and development of writing include William Bright and Peter T. Daniels (eds.), The World’s Writing Systems (1996), a historical survey; and Denise Schmandt-Besserat, Before Writing: From Counting to Cuneiform (1992), which traces the origins of writing to the ancient clay tokens that have been discovered throughout the Middle East. The principal media for writing in the ancient Middle East are examined in Michael W. Haslam, “The Physical Media: Tablet, Scroll, Codex,” in A Companion to Ancient Epic, ed. by John Miles Foley (2005), pp. 142–163. A valuable account of early literacy in the Greek and Roman worlds is William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (1989).

Two important studies detailing the development of print are Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (1979, reissued 1997), which charts the emergence of printing and its social ramifications in the West from the 15th through the 18th century; and Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (1998), a study of early print culture and the link between the print revolution and scientific publication.

Theoretical works that approach literacy as an autonomous phenomenon include Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982, reprinted 2002), a primer on the psychodynamics of oral-traditional communication across various cultures, with proposals on ways in which writing restructures the way people think; David R. Olson, The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading (1994), which also examines the impact of writing, print, and reading on the processing of ideas; and Jack Goody, The Power of the Written Tradition (2000), which argues for the capacity of writing to transform society.

The ideological approach to literacy is demonstrated by David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance (eds.), Literacy and Orality (1991), a collection of essays that probe the social, psychological, and linguistic aspects of literacy in various cultural settings; and Brian Street (ed.), Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy (1993), an anthology of ethnographic essays on literacy. In a similar vein, Harvey J. Graff, The Legacies of Literacy (1987), offers a history of Western literacy that correlates writing and other strategies of communication with the social contexts they supported.

The shifting meaning of reading—across cultures and across time—is the focus of Jonathan Boyarin (ed.), The Ethnography of Reading (1993); and Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (1996). John Miles Foley, How to Read an Oral Poem (2002), offers an introduction to the study of oral tradition.