Alexander Bubb | Roehampton University (original) (raw)

Papers by Alexander Bubb

Oxford University Press eBooks, Apr 13, 2023

This chapter explains why nineteenth-century readers with no specialist or professional commitmen... more This chapter explains why nineteenth-century readers with no specialist or professional commitment to Asian languages and literatures began to take an interest in oriental translations, an interest that can be observed to grow steadily over the course of the century. It proposes four main ‘growth factors’: a climate of religious tolerance and ecumenism, increased opportunities for travel to Asia, imperial consciousness, and concerns surrounding decadence and the perceived cultural decline of the West. It is then shown how each of these factors contributes to the phenomenal popularity of the Rubaiyat of the Persian poet, Omar Khayyam, in a variety of translations between 1880 and 1920. Finally, the chapter defines some of the limits of Victorian cosmopolitanism, beyond which readerly curiosity or sympathy did not readily extend.

My thesis examines Kipling and Yeats within the structure of a ‘comparative biography’. My premis... more My thesis examines Kipling and Yeats within the structure of a ‘comparative biography’. My premise is that reading these two near-exact contemporaries alongside one another yields remarkable discursive echoes. My method consists in identifying these mutual echoes in their poetry and political rhetoric, and charting them against synchronicities in their lives. By reading one author against another in a fashion that might be considered canonically incongruous, I seek to throw light on unacknowledged links running across the cultural nexus of the period. I find these echoes particularly intriguing since Kipling and Yeats were for most of their careers irreconcilable political enemies. Yeats in his political ascendance frequently played to the gallery by denouncing Kipling, while the latter hardly varnished his opinion of Irish poetry and Irish nationalism. However, a cross-reading of the two poets’ bardic ambitions, heroic tropes and interpretations of history reveals that they frequently partake of a common discourse to achieve their opposed political ends. After supplementing this analysis with a biographical perspective, we can perceive that these discourses originate in their late 19th century artistic upbringing, and in the closely linked social circles which they inhabited in fin-de-siècle London. It is their very mutuality during the 1890s which imparts rancour to their twentieth-century attitudes, after the Boer War had ideologically sundered them. Throughout, the thesis conceives them as figures transiting through both space and period. They had to reject but also adapt their Victorian inheritance in order to carry forward the Romantic poetic. Simultaneously, they undertook a physical transition between the colonial or semi-colonial societies of their birth and the metropolitan arena of their celebrity and influence. I see them as hybrid personalities and as romantic intellects, bringing imaginative fire from the colonial margins to satisfy the orientalist curiosity, and to soothe the fin-de-siècle anxieties, of the imperial centre. Although these peregrinations lead to a juggling of identities and poetic masks, in this dynamic lay both their success as authors and their influence as political and prophetic figures.</p

Oxford University Press eBooks, Apr 13, 2023

The Global Histories of Books, 2017

Victorian Literature and Culture

This brief position paper argues for the importance of understanding Victorian translations, in p... more This brief position paper argues for the importance of understanding Victorian translations, in particular English translations from Asian languages, in relation to the specific places where they were produced and where they were read.

Oxford University Press eBooks, Apr 13, 2023

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Apr 28, 2020

Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Feb 17, 2020

Several years ago I was leafing through the papers of Norman Mosley Penzer, a little-known Englis... more Several years ago I was leafing through the papers of Norman Mosley Penzer, a little-known English orientalist, in the Butler Library at Columbia University. Born in 1892, Penzer had arrived too late to make any truly groundbreaking discoveries in the field of Sanskrit literature, but instead he acted as editor, bibliographer and popularizer to the pioneers of his grandparents' generation. In his late twenties he had striven to republish an underappreciated translation of the Kathasaritsagara printed by the Baptist Mission at Calcutta in 1880, and it was for this tribute to unrewarded scholarship that he received greetings from an appreciative well-wisher in February 1928: Are you searching for fresh fields to conquer? There is one book of Indian stories,-the Purushaparīkshā of Vidyāpati,which has never been translated into English, & which is full of folktales & semi-historical stories. It belongs to the 15 th century. The name means "The test of men," & the book classifies men according to their character with appropriate stories for each. There is also a "Strīcharitra" or "Women's pranks", which is most amusing in parts,-but, alas, as Théophile Gautier says "it would raise a blush on the cheek of even a Captain of Dragoons." 1

Kipling Journal, May 1, 2018

Though my focus will be on Lockwood as a student of language and popular speech, I'd like to begi... more Though my focus will be on Lockwood as a student of language and popular speech, I'd like to begin with a quotation from the younger Kipling, in whose work aspects of style and quirks of description often offer suggestive insights into his influential father's cultural mores and priorities. What initially appears a typical piece of weekly reportage-an account of the Mohurram commemorations in late 1887-begins, as so many of Rudyard's articles do, in an affected tone of boredom with the commonplace wonders and odours of parochial Lahore. That is, until the jaded observer's curiosity is activated by a striking image of oral literary culture, undergirt by religious communality: ...one feature of the last night of the Mohurrum cannot be overlooked. In the broader streets, surrounded by the faithful, sat Maulvis reading the story of the death of the Blessed Imams. Their mimbars were of the rudest, but the walls behind them were in most cases gay, with glass lamps, cuckoo-clocks, vile 'export' trinketry, wax flowers and kindred atrocities... but, looking at the men who listened, one forgot the surroundings. They seemed so desperately in earnest, as they rocked to and fro, and lamented. The manner of the Maulvis' preaching varied as much as their audiences. One man, austere, rugged-featured, and filthily clad, had sat down upon a shop-board in a side-alley and his small congregation were almost entirely provincial. He preached literally, as the spirit moved him, and whatever Power may have come upon him held, and shook his body. The jats made no sign. Only one small child ran up and put his hand upon the preacher's knee, unterrified by the working face and the torrent of words. Elsewhere, five massive wooden bedsteads had been piled one above the other to make a mimbar for one who read from a book. He was a strikingly handsome man, level in his speech and philosophical, it seemed, in his arguments. A dirty sheet had been thrown over the uppermost bedstead and by some sport of chance had draped itself 'into great laps and folds of sculptor's work' perfect and solid, so that the preacher looked as though he had been newly taken out of a fresco in a certain palace by the water. 1

This chapter focusses on a certain type of imperial encounter: that of the weary traveller or col... more This chapter focusses on a certain type of imperial encounter: that of the weary traveller or colonial servant who meets, unexpectedly, with a misplaced book. In the late nineteenth century, when cheap, ephemeral, often pirated editions were scattered worldwide, such encounters were a common enough occurrence. For the book’s discoverer however, often starved of reading matter in his or her colonial solitude, its appearance is invested with an air of serendipitous mystery. Sometimes the book may be an old favourite: a haunting relic of a lost Britain. Sometimes it is entirely unfamiliar, and can set its finder off on exciting tangents of cross-cultural thought. Drawing on examples from India, Australia, Malaya and North America, Bubb proposes randomness as a paradigm for studying imperial reading cultures.

The eighty-day sprint around the globe imagined by Jules Verne in 1873 was enabled by a cluster o... more The eighty-day sprint around the globe imagined by Jules Verne in 1873 was enabled by a cluster of transportation breakthroughs. In May 1869, Leland Stanford drove a golden railway spike at Promontory, Utah to herald the opening of direct traffic across the North American continent. Six months later the Empress Eugénie became the first passenger to transit the Suez Canal. The final threshold was attained in March 1870 when, as the Morning Chronicle informs Phileas Fogg at the Reform Club, the main trunk line was completed between Bombay and Calcutta. 1 Hastened partly by the demand at Manchester for Indian cotton, this event represented the first large-scale penetration of Asian markets by European-owned railway companies. As he approaches Allahabad three weeks later, however, Fogg discovers that his implicit trust in the London press was misplaced: there is a gap in the line. Separating the two railheads spread fifty miles of jungle, and an interlude in which Fogg enlists the services of an elephant, and his factotum Passepartout rescues a young sati from the funeral pyre. Such detours into the picaresque, precipitated by erring machinery, are almost generic to satires of modern travel. Since Verne's protagonist is a fastidiously punctual Englishman, moreover, India is the obvious location in which his elite travellers are to be ejected from the comfort of their Pullman car, and forced to negotiate the old world at its own pace. It is notable that this technical miscarriage, however, not only breaks up a narrative bound by schedule, but triggers a series of anachronistic juxtapositions. Fogg's mount, firstly, provides more than facile local colour. It is a war-elephant, the trained pet of rajas who no longer conduct wars. 2 Following the disorienting interlude, which thrusts 1 Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days, trans. by William Butcher

Modern Asian Studies, 2017

This article makes use of a recently unearthed archive in Sweden, complemented by research in the... more This article makes use of a recently unearthed archive in Sweden, complemented by research in the India Office Records and Maharashtra State Archives, to explore the business networks of the small-scale railway contractor in 1860s Bombay Presidency. The argument centres on the career of one individual, comparing him with several contemporaries. In contrast to their civilian colleagues, freebooting engineers have been a somewhat understudied group. Sometimes lacking formal technical training, and without an official position in colonial India, they were distrusted as profiteering, even corrupt, opportunists. This article will present them instead as a diverse professional class, incorporating Parsis alongside various European nationalities, who became specialists in local milieux, sourcing timber and stone at the lowest prices and retaining the loyalty of itinerant labourers. It will propose that the 1860s cotton boom in western India provided them with a short-lived window of opport...

Oxford University Press eBooks, Apr 13, 2023

The Global Histories of Books, 2017

Victorian Literature and Culture

Oxford University Press eBooks, Apr 13, 2023

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Apr 28, 2020

Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Feb 17, 2020

Kipling Journal, May 1, 2018

Modern Asian Studies, 2017

Meeting Without Knowing It compares Rudyard Kipling and W.B. Yeats in the formative phase of thei... more Meeting Without Knowing It compares Rudyard Kipling and W.B. Yeats in the formative phase of their careers, from their births in 1865 up to 1903. The argument consists of parallel readings wed to a biographic structure. Reading the two poets in parallel often yields remarkable discursive echoes. For example, both men were similarly preoccupied with the visual arts, with heroism, with folklore, balladry and the demotic voice. Both struck vatic postures, and made bids for public authority premised on an appeal to what they considered the "mythopoeic" impulse in fin de siecle culture. Meeting Without Knowing It dentifies these mutual echoes in their poetry and political rhetoric, before charting them against intersections in their lives. Kipling and Yeats were, for much of their careers, irreconcilable political enemies. However, a cross-reading of the two poets' bardic ambitions, heroic tropes, and interpretations of history reveals that, to achieve their opposed political ends, they frequently partook of a common discourse. Supplementing this analysis with biographical context, we can trace these shared concerns to their late nineteenth century artistic upbringing, and to the closely linked social circles that they inhabited in fin de siecle London. It is, in fact, their very mutuality during the 1890s which lent rancor to their ideological division after the Boer War. In turn, acrimony and denunciation only served to bind together all the more intimately, in an argumentative spiral of revolving discourses, two men who were often proximate but who actually met only in cartoons and satirical gossip.