This book sets out to uncover the relationships of discourse analysis and literacy to ideological and political formations. The seven chapters deal with: various definitions of "ideology" from the 18th-century philosophers onwards; a history of notions of literacy from Plato to Freire; research from the "New Literacy Studies"; some familiar principles of a theory of meaning; a model of "discourses"; the focus of literacy studies; and analyses of discourse samples to correct earlier oversimplifications and to discuss interactions between different discourses.