Dr Octavia Cox

For Oxford Lifelong Learning, Dr Cox teaches all the way from open-access courses to doctorates, including day schools, weekly classes, online short courses, summer schools, undergraduate, and postgraduate courses.  For the University of Oxford BA, she has taught undergraduate Final Honour School papers and supervised dissertations; she has also supervised dissertations for the University of Oxford MSt in English.

In her teaching she aims to promote deep and exploratory critical thinking about texts and their meanings, with a focus on encouraging each student’s interests, learning, and development.

Her focus is on literary self-consciousness, including intertextuality, metatextuality, and paratextuality; literary inheritances and legacies, canonicity and counter-canonicity; and women’s writing.  Dr Cox is interested in what writers think is good writing, how they explore that in their writing, and in what choices they make about textual construction.

Her doctoral thesis examined the continuing influence of Alexander Pope’s poetry on writers and literary culture during the century after his death.  She is developing this research into her first book, Alexander Pope and Romantic Poetics, which analyses Pope’s presence – materially, figuratively, and intertextually – in the poetry of the Romantic period, countering critical assumptions of Romantic anti-Popeanism.  It considers how Romantic writers used ‘Pope’ as a key figure through which to engage with the perennial question ‘What is Good Poetry?’, and studies how authors use intertextuality to create literary taste and engage with writers whose aesthetics they disagree with.

Her second project, Jane Austen and Genre, analyses ways in which Austen destabilises established conventions in novel genres (bildungsroman, romance, epistolary, gothic, sentimental, fictionalised conduct book), disrupting power structures and challenging readers to reconsider what they want from art.

Journal article and book chapter 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.

Review article publications

• Review of Daniel Cook’s Reading Swift’s Poetry, in Eighteenth-Century Life 48.2 (April 2024), pp.83-7.
• Review of Hrileena Ghosh’s Keats’s Medical Notebook, in Romantic Textualities 24 (Winter 2021), pp.183-7.
• Review of Tim Fulford and Michael E. Sinatra, eds., The Regency Revisited (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), in Romanticism 26.1 (April 2020), pp.107-9.
• Review of Marilyn Morris’s Sex, Money and Personal Character in Eighteenth-Century British Politics (Yale University Press, 2014), in Eighteenth-Century Life 43.3 (September 2019), pp.138-42.
• Review of Michael Gamer’s Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2017), in Studies in Romanticism 56.2 (Summer 2017), pp.285-88.
• Review of Mark Canuel, ed., British Romanticism: Criticism and Debates (Routledge, 2015), in The BARS Review 49 (Spring 2017), pp.13-15.
• Review of Kevin Gilmartin’s William Hazlitt: Political Essayist (Oxford University Press, 2015), in The Hazlitt Review 9 (2016), pp.43-46.