Dr. Antonia Forster

Dr. Antonia Forster

Title: Professor Emeritus
Program: English
Dept/Program: English
Office: Olin 334
Email: forster@uakron.edu
Curriculum Vitae: Download in PDF format

Biography

Antonia Forster, Professor. Her Index to Book Reviews in England 1749-1774 was awarded the 1992 Rose Mary Crawshay Prize by the British Academy, and the second volume to take the Index to 1800 was published by the British Library in 1997. She spent 1996 in Cambridge and Oxford working with James Raven on English Novels 1770-1799: a Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, published by Oxford University Press in 2000. She is also preparing an edition of the correspondence of Ralph Griffiths, founding editor of the Monthly Review, and working on a study of Griffiths and his reviewers, and smaller projects concerned with the reviewing of women writers. She has published articles in such journals as The Age of Johnson, Shakespeare Quarterly, and Studies in Newspaper and Periodical History and has been awarded fellowships for research in the Newberry, Houghton, Beinecke and British Libraries. Her teaching interests focus mainly on writers of the period from 1590 to 1850, especially women and Shakespeare.

Research

Books

  • Index to Book Reviews in England 1749-1774 Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990
  • Index to Book Reviews in England 1775-1800 London: The British Library, 1997
  • vol. 1 (1770-1799) of The English Novel 1770-1829: a Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles (with James Raven). Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2000
  • (ed.) Taming of the Shrew. By William Shakespeare.  (edition of the play with textual introduction, introduction, edited text, commentary and performance notes). London: Methuen and Naperville: Sourcebooks, 2008

Articles

  • Contributor: Composing With WordStar  ed. Rosalie Hewitt, Vicky T. Miller and Judy L. Plazyk. Dubuque: Kendall Hunt, 1986
  • “Mr. Pope’s Maxims” in The Age of Johnson II (1987): 67-91
  • “Eighteenth-Century Shakespeare: Samuel Badcock, a Would-Be Editor”, Shakespeare Quarterly 44.1 (1993): 44-53
  • “`The self-impannelled Jury’: the reception of review journals 1749-1760.” Studies in Newspaper and Periodical History (1993): 27-51
  • “The Griffiths Correspondence” Notes & Queries n.s. 42 (June 1995): 173-174
  • “Ralph Griffiths” in British Literary Publishers before 1820 (vol. 154 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography) ed. James K. Bracken and Joel Silver. (Detroit: Gale, 1995): 150-158
  • “‘Lost Books’ and Publishing History: Two Annotated Lists of Imprints for the Fiction Titles Listed in the Circulating Library Catalogs of Thomas Lowndes (1766) and M. Heavisides (1790), of Which No Known Copies Survive.” (with Edward Jacobs) Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 89: 3 (September 1995): 261-297
  • “Review Journals and the Reading Public.” Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays ed. Isabel Rivers. London and New York: Leicester University Press, 2001. 171-190.(paperback edition 2003) reprint forthcoming 2010 in The History of the Book in the West: 1700-1800. Vol III. ed. Eleanor F. Shevlin (Ashgate)
  • “‘A considerable rank in the world of Belles Lettres’: women, fiction and literary history in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.” Feminist Literary History Re(Dis)Covered  ed. Katherine Binhammer and Jeanne Wood. Newark: University of Delaware Press 2003. 106-118
  • “Samuel Badcock.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ed. H. G. C. Matthew and Brian Harrison. 60 vols.  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) vol. 3, 186-187 (with W. P. Courtney)
  • “Ralph Griffiths.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ed. H. G. C. Matthew and Brian Harrison. 60 vols.  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) vol. 23, 998-1000
  • “William Beloe.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ed. H. G. C. Matthew and Brian Harrison. 60 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) vol. 5, 37-39
  • “Avarice Or Interest: the Secrets of Eighteenth-Century Reviewing.” Yale University Library Gazette 81 (April 2007): 167-176.
  • “Book Reviewing.” The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain vol. 5. ed. Michael Turner and Michael Suarez SJ (Cambridge University Press, 2009)

Reviews

  • “Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England. ed. Isabel Rivers. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982.” Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand 8 (1984): 220-222.
  • “The Conversation of the Sexes by Roy Roussel. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.” Seventeenth-Century News XLVII (Spring-Summer 1989): 19-20
  • “Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Dramatists: Second Series ed. Paula R.Backscheider  (vol. 84 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography)” AEB ns 4 (1990): 225-228
  • “Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen by Elspeth Graham, Elaine Hobby, and Helen Wilcox. London and New York: Routledge, 1990.” The Eighteenth Century: a Current Bibliography n.s. 16 (1990): 276
  • “Tobias Smollett: Critic and Journalist by James G. Basker. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988.” AEB ns 5 (1991): 24-26
  • “Richard Farmer, Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge: A Forgotten Shakespearean by Arthur Sherbo. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992 and Shakespeare’s Midwives: Some Neglected Shakespeareans by Arthur Sherbo.  Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992.” Shakespeare Quarterly 45.2 (Summer 1994): 244-246
  • “The Achievement of George Steevens by Arthur Sherbo. New York: Peter Lang, 1990.” Shakespeare Quarterly 46: 1 (Spring 1995): 109-111
  • “Shakespeare, Milton & Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing: The Beginnings of Interpretative Scholarship by Marcus Walsh. Cambridge University Press, 1997.” Notes and Queries 245. 2 (June 2000): 260
  • “The House of Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Paul Baines. Ashgate Publishing, 1998.”  Notes and Queries 247.2 (June 2002): 301-302
  • “English Professional Theatre, 1530-1660.  eds.  Glynne Wickham, Herbert Berry, and William Ingram.  Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000.” Notes and Queries 247.3 (September 2002): 422-423
  • “Samuel Johnson as Book Reviewer: a Duty to Examine the Labors of the Learned by Brian Hanley. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2001.” Age of Johnson 14 (2003): 413-415
  • “Printers and Readers: Bibliographical Society of Australia & New Zealand Bulletin Volume 25, Numbers 1 and 2, 2001, A Special Issue in Memory of Donald Francis McKenzie, 1931-1999 (2001).” Notes and Queries 249: 3 (September 2004): 330-331.
  • “Donald McKenzie and Maureen Bell, A Chronology and Calendar of Documents Relating to the London Book Trade 1641-1700, vol. I, 1641-1670; vol. II, 1671-1685; vol. III, 1686-1700. Pp. xviii + 643; vii + 458; vii + 468. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.” Notes and Queries 54.2 (June 2007): 191-193.
  • “Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment & the Book: Scottish Authors & Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, & America.  Pp. xxvi + 815.  Chicago & London: University of  Chicago Press, 2006.” Review of English Studies 58 (2007): 740-742.
  • “James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2007. ”Notes and Queries 55.3 (Sept. 2008): 365-366

Education

Ph.D., Univ. of Melbourne

Courses

English Composition I & II, 250 Classic & Contemporary Literature, 252 Shakespeare and His World, 280 Poetry Appreciation, 281 Fiction Appreciation, 282 Drama Appreciation, 301 English literature to 1800 survey, 315 Shakespeare: Early Plays, 316 Shakespeare: Mature Plays, 389 Women Writers, 389 Women Writers Before 1900, 389 Jane Austen, 421/521 Swift and Pope, 424/524 Early English Fiction, 425/525 Studies in Romanticism, 489 Subversive Women, 489 Women’s Writing, Women’s Lives, 489/589 Samuel Johnson and his Circle, 689 Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama, 689 Jane Austen and Frances Burney, 689 Henry Fielding, 691 Bibliography & Literary Research, 689 Women’s Writing, Women’s Lives