Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf

Event details

The 2023 York Asia Research Network (YARN) Autumn Lecture, in association with the Modern School

Since 2015 Dr Alex Bubb has investigated a special genre of travelling text: popular translations of classic literature from Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese and the other major Asian languages, made for the general public in nineteenth-century Britain and America. Largely forgotten now, these accessible, affordable translations did much to introduce curious but non-expert readers in the West to texts like the Bhagavad Gita, the Analects of Confucius, the Shahnameh, and Persian lyric poetry. Dr Bubb’s evidence for the reception of thesetranslations has come largely from pencil annotations, tipped-in items, and other traces left in books by their former owners. Some of these books he found in libraries, but most he has collected himself. In this lecture, Dr Bubb will tell us more about his monograph, along the way ‘showing and telling’ a number of his books in order to illustrate the reading habits, preferences and practices of ‘ordinary’ Victorian readers encountering texts like the Ramayana and Qur’an for the first time.

Alex Bubb is Senior Lecturer in English at Roehampton University in London, and his research focuses on translation, migration and multilingualism in the Victorian world. His second book, Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf: Flights of Translation, investigates the English popular translations through which texts like the Ramayana were disseminated to the general reading public. It was published by Oxford University Press in April 2023.