The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge's Oriental Pilgrimage

Norman J. Girardot's The Victorian Translation of China, James Legge's Oriental Pilgrimage, published by the University of California Press in 2002, is a scholarly intellectual biography examining the missionary translator James Legge's decades of work rendering the Chinese classics into English within the intellectual and religious currents of Victorian Britain. Its authority rests on standard academic peer review at a major university press and Girardot's own extended specialist study of Legge's career and its context. Its strength is situating the same Legge translations this atlas cites elsewhere within the Victorian religious and scholarly assumptions that shaped how Legge himself approached and rendered the texts, a useful corrective to reading a Victorian translation as if it carried no interpretive framework of its own.