Circulating

Abstract

This chapter explains how Asian literature circulated in nineteenth-century British and American society, showing how readers accessed copies of cheap and popular translations in bookshops and lending libraries. But the chapter also discusses their circulation in fragmentary form, not as entire texts but as individual lines and phrases, images or characters, which may be quoted or alluded to in writing, or dropped into conversation. This practice became habitual and ubiquitous by the turn of the century, and manifests particularly clearly in the dissemination of proverbs and aphorisms, which through their continuous reprinting in Victorian periodicals are repeatedly misquoted and misattributed. The chapter then turns to the urban environment, pointing out the numerous towns and streets in Britain and America whose names were derived from Asian literature, and the unobserved presence of statues of Asian authors or of their inscribed names on the façades of public libraries and museums.