Arthur Conan Doyle's Americanisms

Abstract

Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about America and Americans throughout his career, beginning with his second published story, ‘The American’s Tale.’ Thick with Americanisms, ‘The American’s Tale’ includes some rare lexical items, one of them missing from the dictionary record, that lead us to likely sources. A Study in Scarlet and The Valley of Fear also depend on a profusion of Americanisms for the sake of authenticity in their American settings. Conan Doyle’s Americanisms, however, matter beyond cultural ‘flavour.’ In later works, they distinguish informal, lower prestige American speech and culture from formal, higher prestige British speech and culture, and thus help to construct an argument of two cultures on narratological terms.