«This wonderful and insightful book is an important contribution to the history of translation in Victorian Britain and how it underpinned its literary culture. Through painstaking and fascinating archival work, Bubb focuses not only on translators but also on their readers, and how they responded to Asian texts which became 'Classics' in translation. In doing so, he gives us fresh perspectives on the cosmopolitan breadth of Victorian Britain's reading culture, showing how its 'biblioscapes' bear little resemblance to the phobic attitudes of 21st century Britain today. This is a major work on the intellectual and literary history of Victorian Britain, and on the history of translation in the 19th and early 20th century Anglophone world.»

Javed Majeed, Professor of English & Comparative Literature, King's College London

«What I most admire about this extraordinary book is the visionary quality of the knowledge that Alexander Bubb generates through meticulous attention to the material records and physical traces of Victorian readers. Insightfully, and with empathy for all manner of readerly circumstances, Bubb illuminates a Victorian encounter with literatures of the world in a way never before accomplished.»

Annmarie Drury, Associate Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York

«In researching the frequency with which Asian "classics" appeared on Victorian bookshelves, Bubb provides readers with an engaging book history project that usefully counters the truism that Britons were generally uninterested in the empire they had acquired. The author's scrupulous archival research into the circulation history of orientalist translations reveals something far more interesting and nuanced.»

Padma Rangarajan, Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside

«Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf, Bubb explores other, more established archives as well, looking particularly at commonplace books to determine how widely people read and how they responded to these translations.»

TLS

«It is a remarkable achievement in terms of its configuration of a daunting number of texts from six cultures,...The book also reminds us of the pervasive presence of Eastern thought in nineteenth-century culture.»

Kathy Rees

«It is a remarkable achievement in terms of its configuration of a daunting number of texts from six cultures, texts that were translated into English often in multiple versions by an equally daunting line-up of translators, for dissemination by various publishers, and consumption by readers many of whose responses have until now lain forgotten in archives. The book also reminds us of the pervasive presence of Eastern thought in nineteenth-century culture, and alerts us to that legacy in relation to the ways in which today we write, read, and translate.»

Kathy Rees, Translation and Literature 32

«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.»

Andrew King, Victorian Popular Fictions