Wenz Reinvented: The Making and Remaking of a French-Australian Transnational Writer

Abstract

This paper analyses the work of Paul Wenz (1869–1939). Born in Reims, France, Wenz moved to Australia in the 1890s, settling in New South Wales and establishing himself as a grazier. Beginning in 1900, he published several short stories and novels set in Australia. He wrote nearly all of his texts in the French language. Although he was part of literary circles in Australia in the 1920s and 1930s, his writing was little known there and his few works in English garnered little attention. Interestingly, however, his writing has recently found a new audience. First in the mid-1980s to 1990s, then in the 2000s and 2010s, Wenz’s work has been recouped: retranslated, republished and redisseminated – both for a French audience and especially for a contemporary Australian audience. In this article, we examine the different ways in which Wenz’s work has been repackaged, focusing on the paratextual elements in each stage: from Wenz’s initial writing in the early twentieth-century, to its reedition in the mid-1980s and 1990s, through to its retranslation in the early twenty-first century. We chart the stages of the reception of Wenz’s work and its successive translations in order to understand the changing profile of Australian literary studies and of French-Australian cultural connections.