French-Australian Writing: Expanding Multilingual Australian Literature

Abstract

This article takes as its premise Robert Dixon's suggestion that literary scholars “explore and elaborate the many ways in which the national literature has always been connected to the world.” It examines French-Australian literature in light of this assertion. It analyses three examples of such French-Australian writing: one from the nineteenth, one from the twentieth and one from the twenty-first century. Overall, it argues that Australian literature has always been transnational and that a Global Literature in French has a similarly long history.