Table of Contents

1: Introduction: What is a culture of literacy?; Part I: Written culture; 2: The literacy episteme: The rise and fall of a cultural discourse; 3: Literacy and the future of writing: An integrational perspective; 4: The construction of mind and self in an interpretive community 1 2; 5: Hunting, tracking and reading; 6: Narrative distancing: A foundation of literacy; Part II: The shaping of modern written culture; 7: Letters and pictures in seventeenth-century education; 8: Painters and literacy; 9: “Dumb significants” and Early Modern English definition; 10: The spread of culture: Subscription libraries in France in the nineteenth century; 11: The essay as a literary and academic form: Closed gate or open door?; Part III: Literacy as cultural learning; 12: Writing as a form of quotation; 13: Children's conceptions of name: A study on metalinguistic awareness in Italian children; 14: The distinction between graphic system and orthographic system and their pertinence for understanding the acquisition of orthography; 15: Children's analysis of oral and written words; 16: Young children's “clever misunderstandings” about print; 17: Literacy and metalinguistic thought: Development through knowledge construction and cultural mediation; 18: Making new or making do: Epistemological, normative and pragmatic aspects of reading a text

About the Author

Jens Brockmeier teaches at the Free University of Berlin. Since 1995 he has also been a Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto/OISE. He has published in the fields of psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and the history of culture.

Min Wang has a post-doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to work at the Learning Research and Development Center of the University of Pittsburgh.

David R. Olson is University Professor at the University of Toronto/OISE. He is past-president of the Canadian Psychological Association and was co-director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. His research on cognition, language development, and literacy has resulted in numerous books.