Using Roger Williams's Key into America
Symbiosis 1.2 237-53
Author: David Murray
Pages: 18
'Using Roger Williams’s Key into America' by David Murray, provides an insightful analysis of Roger Williams's seminal work, 'A Key into the Language of America.' Originally published in Symbiosis: a Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, this essay explores Williams's role as a mediator between Native American and European cultures in early New England. Murray examines the linguistic, cultural, and religious exchanges detailed in Williams's work, highlighting the complexities and contradictions of his position. This scholarly work is essential for readers interested in early American literature, colonial studies, and the interplay between language and power in cultural encounters.
Symbiosis 1.2 237-53
Author: David Murray
Pages: 18
'Using Roger Williams’s Key into America' by David Murray, provides an insightful analysis of Roger Williams's seminal work, 'A Key into the Language of America.' Originally published in Symbiosis: a Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, this essay explores Williams's role as a mediator between Native American and European cultures in early New England. Murray examines the linguistic, cultural, and religious exchanges detailed in Williams's work, highlighting the complexities and contradictions of his position. This scholarly work is essential for readers interested in early American literature, colonial studies, and the interplay between language and power in cultural encounters.
Symbiosis 1.2 237-53
Author: David Murray
Pages: 18
'Using Roger Williams’s Key into America' by David Murray, provides an insightful analysis of Roger Williams's seminal work, 'A Key into the Language of America.' Originally published in Symbiosis: a Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, this essay explores Williams's role as a mediator between Native American and European cultures in early New England. Murray examines the linguistic, cultural, and religious exchanges detailed in Williams's work, highlighting the complexities and contradictions of his position. This scholarly work is essential for readers interested in early American literature, colonial studies, and the interplay between language and power in cultural encounters.
 "Roger Williams is probably best known today for his distinctive role in early American history as the champion of religious and civil freedoms, a man whose opposition to the theocratic ambitions of the Puritans led to his exile to Rhode Island, to live in close proximity to the Indians of the region. Here I concentrate on one remarkable product of that exile, his 'A Key into the Language of America,' or 'An Help to the Language of the Natives in that part of America called New England.' The larger context of this essay is a concern with the complex of ideas and activities represented as exchange, conversion and translation between Indians and whites in early contacts—not just what is being exchanged, but what is the rhetoric of exchange itself—and Roger Williams’s peculiar situation, between white and Indian societies makes him a particularly useful and intriguing figure." |
