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Dr Octavia Cox

Fellow

Departmental Lecturer

Faculty of English

DPhil (Oxford); MA (Durham); Undergraduate MA (St Andrews)

Dr Octavia Cox is a Departmental Lecturer in English Literature at OUDCE.  She specialises in the literature of the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and is especially interested in how authors reflect on writing in their work.

She has taught open access, undergraduate, and postgraduate students for over a decade, and has published various peer-reviewed articles and chapters.  Her first book will examine the ways in which Romantic writers engaged with the poetry and symbolism of Alexander Pope.  She is also currently researching a book on Jane Austen and genre.

Research Interests 

  • Literary self-consciousness, including intertextuality, metatextuality, and paratextuality
  • Literary inheritances and legacies, canonicity and counter-canonicity
  • Women’s writing
  • Alexander Pope, the Romantics, and Jane Austen

Publications

  • ‘Reforming Taste through Pope’s “celebrated moonlight scene”: Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth’s A Night-Piece’, Romanticism 29.1 (April 2023), pp.56-67.
  • ‘“& Not the Least Wit”: Jane Austen’s Use of ‘Wit’, Humanities 11.6 (2022), article 132.
  • ‘“I am disappointed with England”: Reverse-Robinsonades, and the Transatlantic Woman as Social Critic in The Woman of Colour (1808)’, Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688-1843, ed. Misty Krueger (Bucknell University Press, 2021), pp.144-66.
  • ‘Historicising Keats’s Opium Imagery through Neoclassical Medical and Literary Discourses’, Psychopharmacology and British Literature: 1650 to 1900, eds. Natalie Roxburgh and Jennifer Henke (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp.23-46.
  • ‘The Lady’s Poetical Magazine (1781-82) and the Fashioning of Women’s Literary Space’, Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690-1820s, eds. Jennie Batchelor and Manushag Powell (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), pp.129-48.

You can find her online video lectures on classic literature and literary analysis on her YouTube channel, @DrOctaviaCox.