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About
Alex Bubb is a Senior Lecturer at Roehampton University. He studies translation, migration, multilingualism and cosmopolitanism in the nineteenth-century world, and how these phenomena were shaped by Britain’s prolonged colonial entanglement with India. Particular interests for him have been transnational writers active in 1880s and 1890s London, and the circulation of books and translations throughout the British Empire. While his interests are mainly literary, he originally trained as a historian and has written on several aspects of modern Indian history – including a Scandinavian railway contractor who made his fortune in 1860s Bombay, and the diaries of Irish soldiers serving in India.
In 2016 he published Meeting Without Knowing It: Kipling and Yeats at the Fin de Siècle (Oxford University Press), a comparative study of the two poets at the start of their careers in 1890s London. It won the 2017 University English Book Prize, and was shortlisted for one of the ESSE Book Awards. John Batchelor, writing in Modern Language Review, described it as ‘concise, ingenious, scholarly, dense, and illuminating’.
In 2023 his second book, Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf: Flights of Translation, came out with OUP. It seeks to make a contribution in two areas: translation studies and the history of reading. The appetite of Victorian readers for classical literature from Asia has been greatly underestimated. The popularity of the Arabian Nights and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is well known. But this was also an era in which freethinkers consulted the Quran, in which schoolchildren were given abridgements of the Ramayana to read, in which names like ‘Kalidasa’ and ‘Firdusi’ were carved on the façades of public libraries, and in which women’s book clubs discussed Japanese poetry. Asian Classics explores the numerous popular translations that were created to make these texts accessible to the Victorian and Edwardian general readership.
In 2021, Alex was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship to undertake his third major research project, Polyglot Century: Victorian Cultures of Multilingualism. The 19th Century saw the arrival of mass literacy in Britain, and the emergence of a thriving autodidact culture whereby people with limited formal education acquired knowledge using digests, encyclopaedias and ‘how to’ guides. One aspect of this self-education revolution that remains understudied is foreign language acquisition, accomplished using cheap primers like A Stepping Stone to the French Language (1851) and Elementary Lessons in Chinese (1887), as well as periodicals like The Polyglot Magazine and The Linguist. Alex is undertaking the first thorough study of these materials, which form a significant but little-known subset within the huge body of Victorian self-help and self-improvement literature. A particular focus is the novelist Thomas Hardy, who taught himself French and German using a variety of grammars, readers, dictionaries and phrasebooks.
Expertise
Translation, migration, multilingualism, cosmopolitanism in 19th century