If talking and hearing are 'natural' modes of human communication, how then, did the artificial art of writing come to substitute so satisfyingly for them, and with such deft and commanding authority? Talk to Text: Ancient Origins of Western Prose and the Transition from Oral to Written Culture examines the history of the writing skills that we now practice so casually. These skills were never a human entitlement. Our literary ancestors worked for them, starting from crude scratches on bone, stone, and pottery shards. Over centuries of corrective nitpicking, the Greeks, the classical and papal Romans, the sixth- to eighth-century Irish and Anglo-Saxons, and the Franco-Germanic peoples of the Carolingian renaissance all helped to make writing a flexible and powerful means of communication. Out of speech for the voice and the ear, they invented this secondary route for the transfer of thought-and that route was through the eye. The impact of this spectacular shift and the eventual, even thrilling, development of writing as an art form are the twin topics of this book.

List of Figures - Chronology - Preface - Acknowledgments - What Are We Talking About? - Literacy Begins - Orality-Its Characteristics - In the Clinging Embrace of Orality - Prose Claims Acceptance - The Other Lobe - Fifth-Century Historians Give a Fillip to Prose - Moving Towards Perfection - On Matters of Style - Alexandria Becomes the Hub of Greek Culture - Early Years - The Development of Literary Polish - Relaxing the Rule - Latin Picks Up Steam - Winding Up in the Ancient World - Christian Influences on Latin Literature - Sunblink in the Dusk - Diving Into Pitch - In the Lands of Mist - England Bestirs Itself - Northern Achievements Influence the Continent - A Quick Review of the Writing Arts Today - Termination - Index.

Gwen Groves Robinson is a wide-ranging, world-traveling scholar of language, with a BA in Greek from Bryn Mawr and an MA in English from Houston University. A former academic journal editor, she has authored a book on Tokyo, four novels, and ten articles on punctuation.