Terry F. Robinson

Terry F. Robinson specializes in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature and culture. She is currently finalizing a monograph entitled Reading the Acting Body in the Romantic Age: Performance and Its Truth Effects, 1750-1830, which examines how eighteenth-century histrionic theory and practice influenced literary, artistic, and cultural innovation in the Romantic period. She is also at work on a second book project that examines the politics and poetics of nonbeing in literature and art from the early modern era to the present day. A former fellow with the Lewis Walpole Library (Yale University) and the Huntington Library (San Marino, CA), her work has appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Eighteenth-Century Life, European Romantic Review, Romantic Circles, Studies in Romanticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and BRANCH, among others. She earned her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Colorado, Boulder and, prior to her appointment at the University of Toronto, was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan.

Office Hours

By Appointment.

Publications 

Books

Reading the Acting Body in the Romantic Age: Performance and Its Truth Effects, 1750-1830. Forthcoming with Oxford University Press.

The Visual Life of Romantic Theater, 1780-1830. Ed. with Diane Piccitto. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Forthcoming Spring 2023.

Romanticism and Vision. Ed. with John Savarese. Special Issue of the European Romantic Review 33.4 (2022).

Transnational England: Home and Abroad, 1780-1860. Ed. with Monika Class. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009.

Editions 

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The School for Scandal (1777). Intro. and Contexts. Under contract with Broadview Press.

Mary Robinson, Nobody: A Comedy in Two Acts (1794). Intro., Notes, and Contexts. Romantic Circles. Web. March 2013.

Selected Articles & Book Chapters 

"Deaf Education and the Rise of English Melodrama." Essays in Romanticism 29.1 (April 2022): 1-31.

"Introduction: Romanticism and Vision," with John Savarese. Special Issue of the European Romantic Review. 33.4 (2022): 451-460.

"The 1794 Macbeth and Its Conjuring Effects: Rethinking Romantic-Era Spectatorship." The Visual Life of Romantic Theatre. Ed. with Diane Piccitto. Forthcoming Spring 2023.

"The History of Sophia Shakespear" (1753), and "Chit-Chat; or Natural Characters; and The Manners of Real Life" (1755). The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660-1820. Ed. April London. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Forthcoming 2023.

"Mary Robinson." The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Romantic-Era Women's Writing. Ed. Natasha Duquette. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Forthcoming.

"Interview with Joseph Roach." Eighteenth-Century Studies 53.2 (Winter 2020): 181-190.

"The Romantic Actor as Artist." Keats-Shelley Journal 68 (2019): 166-168.

"Eighteenth-Century Connoisseurship and the Female Body." Oxford Handbooks Online. Oxford UP. Web. 10 May 2017.

"Becoming Somebody: Refashioning the Body Politic in Mary Robinson's Nobody." Studies in Romanticism 55 (Summer 2016): 143-184. Revised and Reprinted in Fashion and Authorship: Literary Production and Cultural Style from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Gerald Egan. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 63-99. Reprinted in Poetry Criticism, vol. 246, ed. Carol A. Schwartz (2022): 267-285.

"National Theatre in Transition: The London Patent Theatre Fires of 1808-1809 and the Old Price Riots." BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Web. 29 March 2016.

"'The glass of fashion and the mould of form': The Histrionic Mirror and Georgian-Era Performance." Eighteenth-Century Life 39.2 (April 2015): 30-65.

“‘Life is a tragicomedy!': Maria Edgeworth's Belinda and the Staging of the Realist Novel.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 67.2 (September 2012): 139-176.

"John Philip Kemble." The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature. Ed. Frederick Burwick, Nancy Moore Goslee, and Diane Long Hoeveler. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 2: 723-730.

"Sarah Siddons." The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature. Ed. Frederick Burwick, Nancy Moore Goslee, and Diane Long Hoeveler. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 2: 1252-1261.

“Mary Robinson and the Dramatic Art of the Comeback,” with Michael Gamer. Studies in Romanticism 48.2 (Summer 2009): 219-256.

"Introduction," with Monika Class. Transnational England: Home and Abroad, 1780-1860. Ed. Monika Class and Terry F. Robinson. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. 1-20.

“James Kenney.” Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 344: Nineteenth-Century British Dramatists. Detroit: Gale, 2008. 206-224.  

“James Kenney’s Comedic Genius: Early Nineteenth-Century Character, Commerce, and the Arts in Raising the Wind, The World!, and Debtor and Creditor.” Literature Compass 3.5 (Aug. 2006): 1082-1106.

“‘A mere skeleton of history’: Reading Relics in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey.” European Romantic Review 17.2 (Apr. 2006): 215-227.

Interviews and Online Writing 

"On This Day in 1823: The African Grove Theater and Ira Aldridge." BARS Blog: 'On This Day' Series. Forthcoming June 2023.

Interviewed by Scott Rayter, "Connoisseurship: Is It Time for a Comeback?" The Art Newspaper (August 5, 2021).

"Celebrity Couture: A New Trend? Fashionista Mary Robinson Led the Way - Over 230 Years Ago." The 18th-Century Common. Ed. Andrew Burkett and Jessica Richard. Web. 1 August 2017.

 "Fashionable Vice in 1790s England: Mary Robinson’s Nobody." The 18th-Century Common. Ed. Andrew Burkett and Jessica Richard. Web. 3 June 2013.

Book and Theatre Reviews

Rev. of Fictions of Presence: Theatre and Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain, by Ros Ballaster (The Boydell Press, 2020). Eighteenth-Century Studies. Forthcoming 2023.

Rev. of Romanticism and Theatrical Experience: Kean, Hazlitt, and Keats in the Age of Theatrical News, by Jonathan Mulrooney (Cambridge UP, 2019). Studies in Romanticism (Summer 2020): 257-261.

Rev. of Comic Acting and Portraiture in Late-Georgian and Regency England, by Jim Davis (Cambridge UP, 2015). The Wordsworth Circle 47.4 (Autumn 2016): 200-202. 

Rev. of She Stoops to Conquer. By Oliver Goldsmith. Dir. Martha Henry, The Stratford Festival, Stratford, ON, May 16-Oct. 10, 2015. Restoration & Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 30.1-2 (May 2016): 121-127.

Rev. of The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre, 1737-1832, edf. Julia Swindells and David Francis Taylor (Oxford UP, 2014). Eighteenth-Century Fiction 27.3-4 (Spring-Summer 2015): 735-41.

Rev. of The Beaux' Stratagem. By George Farquhar. Dir. Antoni Cimolino, The Stratford Festival, Stratford, ON, July 31-Oct. 11, 2014. Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 28.2 (2014): 71-76.

Rev. of Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium 1770-1790, by Daniel O’ Quinn (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011). The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 55.2–3 (Summer/Fall 2014): 307-312.

Rev. of The Plays of William Godwin, ed. David O'Shaughnessy (Pickering & Chatto, 2010) AND William Godwin and the Theatre, by David O'Shaughnessy (Pickering & Chatto, 2010). British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS) Bulletin and Review 39 (Dec. 2011): 20-22.