From the work of medieval spiritualist Margery Kempe and John Foxes\u2019 Book of Martyrs to nineteenth century American scrapbooks, Mexican ex-votos, and Italian-American cookbooks, the essays in Popular Literacy examine acts of reading, writing, and speaking that take place at the margins of official, institutionalized literacy. The contributors explore these noncanonical, unschooled, and unauthorized acts in order to explore how people make literacy popular by using whatever means of communication is at hand, to their own ends. The essays treat a range of topics, agents, and historical settings, and the contributors use a variety of theoretical frameworks and methods from a number of fields: ethnography, American studies, history, literary criticism, science studies, rhetoric, and writing studies. The chapters examine particularly revealing historical moments and cultural conjunctures where instances of popular literacy take place in uneasy relation to the dominant institutions—the church, the state, the schools, the market. The contributors show that while the practices of popular literacy are never free from these influences, neither are they altogether encapsulated by them. Taken as a whole, the essays are loosely aligned in a common project to study the ways ordinary (and extraordinary) readers, speakers, and writers use literacy to articulate identities and social aspirations, to produce alternative forms of cultural knowledge, and to cope with the asymmetries of power that regulate cultural life. “There is more to literacy than academic literacy. We know this. We do write about it. But it’s been a while since there was a collection on literacy outside the academy that was written with humor and theoretical weight. In reviewing the essays, I kept falling into scholar mode rather than reviewer mode, finding myself reading every word, often stopping to takes notes. That’s what the essays in this collection will do—engage us yet again in a subject we should never leave behind.” —Víctor Villanueva, Washington State University From the work of medieval spiritualist Margery Kempe and John Foxes\u2019 Book of Martyrs to nineteenth century American scrapbooks, Mexican ex-votos, and Italian-American cookbooks, the essays in Popular Literacy examine acts of reading, writing, and speaking that take place at the margins of official, institutionalized literacy. The contributors explore these noncanonical, unschooled, and unauthorized acts in order to explore how people make literacy popular by using whatever means of communication is at hand, to their own ends. The essays treat a range of topics, agents, and historical settings, and the contributors use a variety of theoretical frameworks and methods from a number of fields: ethnography, American studies, history, literary criticism, science studies, rhetoric, and writing studies. The chapters examine particularly revealing historical moments and cultural conjunctures where instances of popular literacy take place in uneasy relation to the dominant institutions—the church, the state, the schools, the market. The contributors show that while the practices of popular literacy are never free from these influences, neither are they altogether encapsulated by them. Taken as a whole, the essays are loosely aligned in a common project to study the ways ordinary (and extraordinary) readers, speakers, and writers use literacy to articulate identities and social aspirations, to produce alternative forms of cultural knowledge, and to cope with the asymmetries of power that regulate cultural life. Used Book in Good Condition