In March 2017 eleven outstanding scholars from France and elsewhere gathered in Strasbourg on the occasion of a big international symposium celebrating RANAM's 5Oth anniversary. RANAM 50 is the proceedings of this conference. The eleven papers cover numerous topics all having to do with the culture of the English-speaking world, past and present, and offer fresh reconfigurations of the concept of genre, in the fields of literature, linguistics and social studies. RANAM 50 is an important contribution to the present-day debate on generic taxonomies, an issue which raises numerous theoretical and typological issues.