Alexander Bubb is Senior Lecturer in English at Roehampton University in London. His principal interests lie in Victorian literature and art, as shaped by the European encounter with Asia. Besides fin-de-siècle poetry, he has written on the circulation of books in the British Empire, and technological obsolescence in colonial fiction. He has also published on aspects of modern Indian history - including the business practices of early railway contractors, Irishmen in the colonial military, migrant Indian intellectuals in 1890s London, and the origins of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (which prohibits sex between men). In 2017-18 he was a Marie Curie visiting fellow at Trinity College Dublin, where he began writing his second book on popular translations, made for the Victorian general reader, of classic literature from five Asian languages.

University English Book Prize for a first book by a UK early-career researcher

"a fascinating analysis of literary interaction that firmly situates its subjects in their British, Irish, and Indian contexts. By looking at the underlying connections between Kipling and Yeats, Bubb provides an original and engaging reading of fin-de-siècle interaction." -- Joseph Thorne, Liverpool John Moores University, British Association of Victorian Studies newsletter

"Meeting Without Knowing It is a meticulously phrased and engaging study of Kipling's and Yeats's transitional narratives, which raises questions not only about their reception histories, canonical divisions and patterns of mutual exchange, but also about generic strategies of confronting the fragmentation of metropolitan living with the imagined unity of peripheral homes lost and remembered." --Forum for Modern Language Studies

"It is easy to recommend this painstaking analysis and detailed use of sources in pursuing the 'submerged relationship'." -- Jad Adams, Yeats Annual

"Alexander Bubb's innovative handling of the lives and work of Rudyard Kipling and W. B. Yeats looks set to blaze a trail in literary biography." -- Kathy Rees, Notes and Queries

"Highlighting the underacknowledged yet evidently important dynamic between Yeats and Kipling in their capacities as authors and public figures, this monograph is rich in content and expression, and is a welcome addition to the study of Yeats and Kipling as part of the intricate fabric of fin de siecle cultural production." --Ragini Mohite, International Yeats Studies

"Meeting Without Knowing It is a rich and original study of the "cultural nexus" (243) that was the fin de siècle. It takes the provocative but productive step of proceeding through an extended comparison of the lives and careers of Rudyard Kipling and W.B. Yeats, from 1865 to 1906." --David Sergeant, Journal of Postcolonial Writing

"...a concise, ingenious, scholarly, dense, and illuminating double biographical study." --John Batchelor, The Modern Language Review

"a rich and rewarding study of both writers, which succeeds in showing how their affiliations, writings and beliefs reflected and refracted one another." --Jan Montefiore, Times Literary Supplement