Literacy and Historical Development: A Reader » (3rd Edition)

Harvey J. Graff, Ohio Eminent Scholar in Literacy Studies and a professor of English and history at Ohio State University, is one of the world’s most noted literacy scholars. He is the author, editor, or coeditor of eighteen books, including the landmark The Literacy Myth; The Legacies of Literacy; and Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America, and dozens of scholarly articles.

Representing three decades of research, Literacy and Historical Development: A Reader presents some of the most important historical scholarship on literacy in Europe and the United States. The approaches, research, and conclusions reflected in this collection of fifteen essays has changed how historians and many others conceptualize literacy and represents a body of scholarship that is transforming both contemporary and historical literacy theories.

 

In this revised and expanded edition of the groundbreaking volume Literacy and Social Development in the West, editor Harvey J. Graff provides a new introduction and nine new essays by nationally and internationally renowned contributors from a range of disciplines. Replacing an unquestioned certainty that literacy’s powers are universal, independent, and determinative, Graff brings together studies that support new concepts, contending that the importance and influences of literacy depend on specific social and historical contexts, the impacts of literacy are mediated and restricted, the effects of literacy are social and particular, and the role of literacy must be understood within the burgeoning array of communication technologies.

List of Figures and Tables     ix
Acknowledgments     xi
Introduction   Harvey J. Graff     1
Literacy, Myths, and Legacies: Lessons from the History of Literacy   Harvey J. Graff     12
Literate and Illiterate; Hearing and Seeing: England, 1066-1307   Michael T. Clanchy     38
Some Conjectures about the Impact of Printing on Western Society and Thought: A Preliminary Report   Elizabeth L. Eisenstein     82
The Importance of Being Printed   Anthony T. Grafton     106
Printing and the People: Early Modern France   Natalie Zemon Davis     126
Oral Culture and the Diffusion of Reformation Ideas   Robert Scribner     161
The Literacy Myth? Illiteracy in Scotland, 1630-1760   Rab Houston     183
First Steps in Literacy: The Reading and Writing Experiences of the Humblest Seventeenth-Century Spiritual Autobiographers   Margaret Spufford     207
The History of Literacy in Sweden   Egil Johansson     238
Growth of Literacy in Colonial America: Longitudinal Patterns, Economic Models, and the Direction of Future Research   Farley Grubb     272
Dimensions of Illiteracy in England, 1750-1850   Roger S. Schofield     299
''We Slipped andLearned to Read": Slave Accounts of the Literacy Process, 1830-1865   Janet Cornelius     315
Sense and Sensibility: A Case Study of Women's Reading in Late-Victorian America   Barbara Sicherman     334
Sponsors of Literacy   Deborah Brandt     357
"Welcome to the Jam": Popular Culture, School Literacy, and the Making of Childhoods   Anne Haas Dyson     379
Bibliography of the History of Literacy in Western Europe and North America     417
Contributors     441
Index     445