What role has writing played in the development of our modern understanding of language, nature, and ourselves? In the historical and developmental account, David Olson offers a new perspective on this process. Reversing the traditional assumption about the relation between speech and writing, he argues that writing provides an important model of the way we think about speech; that our consciousness of language is structured by our writing system. In addition, he argues that writing provides our dominant models for thinking about nature and the mind, and shows how our understanding of the world and our understanding of ourselves are by-products of our ways of creating and interpreting written texts. This challenging study draw in recent advances in history, anthropology, linguistics, and psychology.

1. Demythologising literacy; 2. Theories of literacy and mind from Levy-Bruhl to Scribner and Cole; 3. Literacy and the conceptual revolutions of Classical Greece and Renaissance Europe; 4. What writing represents; 5. What writing doesn't represent; 6. The problem of interpretation; 7. A history of reading; 8. Reading the Book of Nature; 9. A history of written discourse; 10. Representing the world in maps, diagrams, formulas, pictures and texts; 11. Representing the mind; 12. The making of the literate mind.