Aurality in Print: Revisiting Roger Williams’s A Key into the Language of America

This essay combines a history of publication with a discussion of the sonic dimensions of Roger Williams’s seventeenth-century Narragansett-English vocabulary, A Key into the Language of America, modeling one way literary scholars might think beyond print-centric analyses. Drawing on historical reprintings as well as Native American linguistic reappropriations of A Key, I argue that cross-cultural encounter emerges most powerfully in relation to Williams’s text not as a vestige of the past, accessible through the dialogues or the language, but as a function of the text’s reproduction, the audiences’ imagination of its reproducibility, and the points at which it fails to be a mimetic record. (NG)