Literacy and Literature in Popular Culture: Reading and Writing in Historical Perspective

Abstract

Literacy and literature have been fundamental in discussions of popular culture in the early modern period. On the one hand, popular culture, defined negatively in contrast to elite culture, has often been seen as the culture of the illiterate, a culture transmitted orally by customs and practice, not through the printed word. It has been argued that the growing literacy of the middling sort, and the sharp social distinctions observed in the ability to sign, created a growing divide between a literate, respectable culture and the oral world of popular tradition. Yet, at the same time, historians have sought to uncover the values of popular culture through the growing mass of ‘popular literature’, notably ballads, chapbooks and other ephemeral publications but also the radical and other writings of the minority of working people who recorded their views and experiences in print. How can we reconcile these two apparently contradictory positions?

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