From littérature voyageuse to littérature-monde via migrant literatures: Towards an ethics and poetics of littérature-monde through French-Australian literature

Abstract

French-Australian literature – does this category of writing really exist? If so, how, when, where and … why? These initial interrogations regarding the corpus for this study are unsurprising, given its unusual, even unexpected focus on a little known literary phenomenon that has, however, a longer history than one might expect – a history that is certainly too complex to outline in a prefatory note. As an indication of the significant corpus that does exist, however, French fictional writings on Australia pre-date European colonization and settlement of the Great South Land. They include Gabriel de Foigny’s La Terre Australe connue (1676), Denis de Vairasse’s Histoire des Sévarambes (1677),..