During the period of my fellowship, I propose to study and to initiate collaborative research on the topic of ‘Ireland and the Colonies’ to be linked to the Institute’s 2013 priority theme, Cross-currents in global humanities:  communicating the challenge of cultural exchange beyond borders. The project will focus on the comparative and transnational dimensions of the Irish colonial experience, seeking to compare and connect Ireland with other colonies, both east and west, within the history of the British empire. 

Research            
The postcolonial legacy of British imperialism in India is the point of intersection between my research and teaching interests in literature of the long eighteenth century and contemporary Indian literature in English. My first book, Revisionary Gleam: De Quincey, Coleridge and the High Romantic Argument (2000), explores the literary relationship between De Quincey and Coleridge with regard to literary and linguistic theories forged within the historical context of colonial expansion in India and war with revolutionary France. My edition of Robert Southey’s The Curse of Kehama (2004) uncovers the extent of Southey’s engagement with Indological researches of his time, placing his work at the forefront of debates regarding Orientalism in the period. This work was cited as a ‘Distinguished Scholarly Edition’ by the MLA in 2008. My other book-length publications include an edition of Thomas De Quincey’s Autobiographic Sketches (2003) and two collections of critical essays, Thomas De Quincey: New Theoretical and Critical Directions (2008), and Romanticism and Blackwood’s Magazine (2013), both edited with Robert Morrison.

I am currently editing a novel by Charles Johnstone, The History of Arsaces, Prince of Betlis, for the Early Irish Fiction series from Four Courts Press, and (along with Simon Davies and Gabriel Sanchez Espinosa) a collection of essays entitled India and Europe in the Global Eighteenth Century for the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series to be published by the Voltaire Foundation, Oxford. My research relating to the Irish writer Charles Johnstone who followed a literary career in London and Calcutta has uncovered hitherto unattributed material published by Johnstone in early Calcutta newspapers of the 1780s, a find that was published in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (2011). Johnstone’s vast transnational fictions are poised between the fabulous worlds of earlier eighteenth-century fictions such as Gulliver’s Travels and the more sober antiquarian and geographical researches typical of nineteenth-century Orientalism. Novels such as The History of Arsaces, Prince of Betlis (1774), written on the eve of the American Revolutionary War encompass a colonial framework which includes restive colonies in the New World in conjunction with the newly acquired territories of the east in the wake of the Seven Years’ War.  A common thread running through my choices of authors and texts has been their involvement in imperial concerns. Such concerns are of crucial significance to the global relevance of the Humanities today as recognised by the priority theme of the Institute of Collaborative Studies.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Books and Scholarly Editions:

-- Daniel S. Roberts, Revisionary Gleam: De Quincey, Coleridge and the High Romantic Argument (Liverpool University Press, 2000). Pp. 311+xxi.

-- Daniel S. Roberts (ed.), Autobiographic Sketches for Volume 19 of The Works of Thomas De Quincey, 21 vols.General Editor: Professor Grevel Lindop, University of Manchester (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999-2003). Pp.499+xxii.

--  Daniel S. Roberts (ed.), The Curse of Kehama, Volume 4 of The Works of Robert Southey, 1793-1810, 5 vols. General Editor: Lynda Pratt, University of Nottingham (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2004). Pp.412+xxx.

Collaborative Publications:

-- Daniel Sanjiv Roberts et al. (eds.), Prefaces, Marginalia, Undateable Manuscripts for Vol 20 of The Works of Thomas De Quincey, 21 vols. General Editor: Grevel Lindop (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003). This volume was co-edited by all 8 editors of the Collected Works.

-- Robert Morrison and Daniel S. Roberts (eds.), Thomas De Quincey: New Theoretical and Critical Directions (New York: Routledge, 2008).

-- Robert Morrison and Daniel S. Roberts (eds.), Romanticism and Blackwood’s Magazine: An Unprecedented Phenomenon (London: Palgrave, 2013).

Selected Journal Articles/Chapters post-2006:

-- “‘Merely Birds of Passage’: Lady Hariot Dufferin’s Travel Writings and Medical Work in India, 1884-88,” Women’s History Review 15:3 (2006), pp. 443-57.

-- “Beneath High Romanticism: Southeian Orientations in De Quincey,” Robert Southey and the Contexts of British Romanticism, ed. Lynda Pratt (London: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 35-48.

-- “Rushdie and the Romantics: Intertextual Politics in Haroun and the Sea of Stories,” Ariel 38.4 (Oct 2007), pp. 123-42.

-- “‘The Luther of Brahminism’: Coleridge and the Reformation of Hinduism,” in James Vigus and Jane Wright (eds), Coleridge’s Afterlives (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 85-112.

-- “Biblical Orientalism in Thomas De Quincey,” Thomas De Quincey: New Theoretical and Critical Directions, ed. by Robert Morrison and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 19-44.

-- “‘In the Service of the Honourable East India Company’: Politics and Identity in Dean Mahomet’s Travels (1794),” Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 24 (2009), pp. 116-235.

-- “The Janus-face of Romantic Modernity: Thomas De Quincey’s Metropolitan Imagination,” Romanticism 17.3 (Oct. 2011), pp. 299-308.

-- “A ‘Teague’ and a ‘True Briton’: Charles Johnstone, Ireland and Empire,” Irish University Review 41.1 (2011), pp. 133-150.

-- “Newly Recovered Articles from The Calcutta Gazette by Charles Johnstone,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland 26 (2011), pp.140-169.

-- “Dark Interpretations: Romanticism’s Ambiguous Legacy in India,” Legacies of Romanticism: Literature, Culture, Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 215-230.

 

For my School of English staff profile see: http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofEnglish/Staff/StaffProfile/?school=English&ns=61ca4809929efadc0d9e0709bad6740972c2590437d7f37047b82bbc652e1067&staff
_name=Dr+Daniel+Sanjiv+Roberts+-+Romanticism+and+Indian+Literature+in+English

Expressions of interest and/or queries relating to research may be directed to: d.s.roberts@qub.ac.uk