French-Australian Writing: Expanding Multilingual Australian Literature

In 'Australian Literature-International Contexts ' (2007), Robert Dixon called for what he termed 'a transnational practice of Australian literary criticism ' (19).In this article, Dixon traced the history of Australian literary criticism, noting in particular the influence of 'world literature' and transnational studies since the 1990s.In a six-point plan that aimed to develop a transnational approach to Australian literature, he suggested literary critics pay greater attention to transnational Australian writers and to the influence of multicultural backgrounds upon the shape of Australian literature.He argued that it was now time to move beyond cultural nationalism to 'explore and elaborate the many ways in which the national literature has always been connected to the world' (20).Indeed, the attention to minority writers that had been gradually growing for several decades had extended to lively discussion of transnational writing by the early twenty-first century.Two years after the publication of Dixon's field-leading article, Michael Jacklin declared a 'transnational turn,' pointing to a 'surge of references in Australian literary studies over the last few years to the transnational dimensions of the national literature' (1).Against the backdrop of debates in world literature, Dixon's call was apt.In the wake of the popularity of the field of world literature that had spread so rapidly in the US, how could Australian literature be reconsidered?David Damrosch's hugely influential work pushes literary critics to reconsider some of the time-honoured categories that have organised our disciplinary enquiry.From What is World Literature? (2003) through his many collaborative works, such as How to Read World Literature, Teaching World Literature and The Longman Anthology of World Literature (all 2009), Damrosch suggests new modes of interpretation and of identification, suggesting that 'a work enters world literature by a double process: first, by being read as literature; second, by circulating out into a broader world beyond its linguistic and cultural point of origin ' (2003, 6).Do Australian texts correspond to such a theory?It is worth pausing to consider these two stipulations in terms of Australian literary studies.Looking at Damrosch's first condition, are Australian texts read as literature and, if so, by whom?Are Australian authors considered favourably by readers in other parts of the world, both Englishspeaking and non-English-speaking? Damrosch's second condition raises two separate but interlinked questions regarding Australian texts.First, do they circulate out into a world beyond their Australian 'cultural point of origin'?Do they find a readership in other Anglophone spaces, for example?Do they form part of a canon of literature in English?Are they included in University curricula-particularly in the US-inspired 'World Literature' programs?Pascale Casanova suggested in The World Republic of Letters that literary markets revolve around cosmopolitan capitals-Paris, London, New York-that bestow recognition on literary texts.Do Australian texts circulate in these capitals?And are Sydney, Melbourne or Perth, for instance, such cosmopolitan capitals?Second, do Australian texts circulate beyond their 'linguistic point of origin'?This question raises the issue of translation.Are Australian texts translated and made available to readers in non-Anglophone areas?It also raises the question of English as a dominant language in Australian literature, and it is this that is the focus of this article.There is a growing awareness in Australian literary studies of the presence of-and, indeed, the history of-Australian literature in languages other than English.Huang Zhong and Wenche Ommundsen broach this question in 'Towards a Multilingual National Literature: The Tung Wah Times and the origins of Chinese Australian Writing,' pointing out that 'one large and important body of Australian writing has remained excluded from histories and anthologies: literature in languages other than English' (1).Beyond the investigation of Chinese-Australian writing that is the subject of this particular article, the ground-breaking project on multilingual Australian literature undertaken by Ommundsen, Zhong and Jacklin generated knowledge of Australian literature written in Arabic, Chinese, Spanish and Vietnamese. 1 In addition to this project, several other scholars have explored Australian literature written in languages other than English.Shen Yuanfang, for example, has analysed Australian autobiographies written in Chinese (2001).John Gatt-Rutter has also completed extensive work on Australian writing in Italian (2014).In this article, and in the larger project of which it forms part, we contribute French-

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