Dr Octavia Cox

I research literature of the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, focusing on literary self-consciousness, including intertextuality, metatextuality, and paratextuality; literary inheritances, canonicity, and counter-canonicity; and women’s writing.

My first monograph, Alexander Pope and the Romantics, examines the presence of Pope’s poetry in the Romantic period—materially, figuratively, and intertextually— countering critical assumptions of Romantic anti-Popeanism.  It considers the complexity with which Romantic poets answer the deceptively simple question ‘What is Poetry?’, and examines how authors use intertextuality to create literary taste and engage with writers whose aesthetics they disagree with.  My 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.