'It is a tradition for the organizers of the annual conference of the Société des Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur (SAES) to choose a topic that will be found doubly relevant, first as conducive to exchanges across the disciplines constitutive of English studies, and second as emblematic of the region where the event is hosted. The 2016 SAES conference took place in Lyon, the city where the mighty Rhône and sedate Saône rivers flow together, at the very tip of the peninsula or “Presqu’île” nestled between the two hills of Fourvière and La Croix Rousse. “Confluence” was therefore the theme proposed to the delegates who met there between June 2 and June 5, 2016. The site’s geography played an essential role in the development of the Roman military camp that became the capital of the Gauls as Lugdunum flourished between the Renaissance and the industrial revolution, and is now the most important educational centre in France after Paris, at least if we are to believe the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It also happens that Lyon is my hometown, the city where I grew up and went to university to study English. It is a rather apt and, to me at least, moving coincidence that my 2011-2017 mandate as general editor of Commonwealth Essays and Studies and president of the Société d’Etude des Pays du Commonwealth (SEPC) should come to an end with the publication of this joint issue for which I have edited six essays. Four of them were presented during the 2016 Confluence conference, but all of them engage with its federating topic on several, complementary levels as shall now be seen.' (Introduction)
Contents indexed selectively.
'The Australian writer Murray Bail's 'Notebooks' feature a change of stance that interrogates the self-place relationship: initially dominated by an ideal of placelessness, they then seek to forge new bonds with a reimagined homeland. This essay examines the political implications of this paradigmatic shift. Arguably, the sense of identity that finds expression in this unconventional autobiography depends, in part, on a radical reconceptualisation of the Australian space.' (Publication abstract)
''Waiting for the Barbarians' (1980) recounts the rebellion of the Magistrate of an Empire frontier outpost against the torture inflicted on those the Imperial administration which employs him considers as "barbarians." The first-person narration is a strategy enabling the author to personalize the Magistrate whose name he never reveals, above all because through it we are allowed to witness the workings of conscience. The novel is a drama of the opposition between justice and law, and of what happens when men who are supposed to uphold the law in fact neglect justice and abuse their power, themselves becoming worse than "barbarians." Within this complex moral and ethical framework the essay at hand proposes to explore the modalities of personhood as established by Coetzee, and its limits.' (Publication abstract)
'Although Ada Cambridge is a major writer of the colonial period, she has long been neglected in Australian literary history. Her serial novel 'A Woman's Friendship', published in the Melbourne paper 'The Age' (August-October 1889), was widely read and circulated and, as such, offered a way in the social and gender debates of the time. This paper aims to reflect on Cambridge's ambivalent representation of female characters and gender issues in the 1880s Australian society, oscillating between convergence and divergence with conventions, and between conformism and radicalism.' (Publication abstract)
