Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf

I started this review by saying that Asian Classics was a book relevant to readers of this journal. I conclude by saying rather that it should be essential reading. All of us can learn from its methodological precision, its reflexivity and its thoroughgoing engagement with material evidence, from its clear ethical stance where human actors and passions are never forgotten even in the analysis of systems, and from its elegant, readable and always engaging style. For it cares about you too, dear reader. Asian Classics offers a writing model for us all.

Auteur
Alexander Bubb is a Senior Lecturer in English at Roehampton University. He is the author of Meeting Without Knowing It: Kipling and Yeats at the Fin de Siècle (OUP, 2016), which won the University English Book Prize (2017), and was nominated for the European Society for the Study of English Book Awards in the early-career category (2018). His research concerns translation, migration, multilingualism, and cosmopolitanism in the Victorian world, and how these phenomena were shaped by Britain's relationship with India.

Texte du rabat

The interest among Victorian readers in classical literature from Asia has been greatly underestimated, and Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf explains the process whereby popular translations were written, published, distributed to bookshops and libraries, and ultimately consumed by readers.