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Dr Jessica Cox
Divisional Lead/Reader in English Literature

Gaskell Building 126

Teaching

Jessica is a fellow of the Higher Education Academcy, and currently Programme Lead for English (undergraduate). She convenes a number of modules, including The Nineteenth-Century Novel (level 2), Victorian Literature and Culture (level 3) and the English Special Project (level 3). She also supervises final year undergraduate and MA dissertations.

Activities:

Jessica's current research focuses on two key intersecting areas: Victorian popular culture, and nineteenth-century discourses around the (female) body. She is currently completing a monograh (for Palgrave Macmillan) on the afterlife of the Victorian sensation novel, and beginning a major project on cultural histories of breastfeeding.  

She has published widely on Victorian and neo-Victorian literature and culture.  Her most recent publication examines the afterlives of Jane Eyre's Bertha Mason (in Amber K. Regis and Deborah Wynne, eds., Charlotte Brontë’: Legacies and Afterlives, Manchester University Press, 2017).  She is editor of a collection of essays on Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Rodopi, 2012), as well as co-editor of a major anthology on Women and Belief (Routledge History of Feminism series, 2012), and of a special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies (2010).  She has contributed blogs to the Journal of Victorian Culture online, and the History of Pregnancy Network.

Select Publications:

Journal Articles:

‘Canonisation, Colonisation, and the Rise of Neo-Victorianism’. English: Journal of the English Association, Volume 66, Issue 253 (1 June 2017), pp.101–123.

‘“[T]he Ghost of Myself”: Women, Art and (Neo-) Sensational Representation in Joanne Harris’s Sleep, Pale Sister (1994)’, Contemporary Women’s Writing Vol. 7: 3 (2013), pp.346-360

‘“A strange postmodern moment”: Revisiting Pride and Prejudice in ITV’s Lost in Austen (2008)’, Critical Studies in Television, Vol. 8:1 (Spring 2013), pp.36-51

‘Gender, Conflict, Continuity: Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) and Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893)’, Brontë Studies, Vol. 35, No. 1, March 2010, pp.30-39

‘“A Touch of In’nard Fever”: Illness and Moral Decline in Elster’s Folly (1866)’, Women’s Writing, special issue on Mrs Henry Wood (eds. Andrew Maunder and Emma Liggins), Vol. 15:2 (August 2008), pp.232-43

‘Gendered Visions: The Figure of the Prostitute in Wilkie Collins’, The New Magdalen (1873) and The Fallen Leaves (1879)’, Wilkie Collins’ Society Journal, New Series Vol. 8, 2005, pp.3-18

‘From Page to Screen: Transforming M. E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret’, Journal of Gender Studies, Vol. 14:1, March 2005, pp.23-31

‘Representations of Illegitimacy in Wilkie Collins’ Early Novels’, Philological Quarterly, Vol. 83 (Spring 2004), pp.147-69

Book Chapters:

‘“The Insane Creole”: The Afterlife of Bertha Mason’; in Amber K. Regis and Deborah Wynne (eds.). Charlotte Brontë’: Legacies and Afterlives; Manchester University Press, 2017, pp.222-49.

‘Gothic and Victorian Supernatural Tales’; invited contribution to Dominic Head (ed.). The Cambridge History of the English Short Story; Cambridge University Press, 2016.

“The bad dreams always come back again”: Narratives of Sexual Trauma in Contemporary Adaptations of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), in Nadine Böhm and Susanne Gruss (eds.), Fashioning the Neo-Victorian: Iterations of the Nineteenth Century in Contemporary Literature and Culture (Routledge, 2014), pp.137-50.

‘Reading Faces: Physiognomy and the Depiction of the Heroine in the Fiction of Wilkie Collins’, in Andrew Mangham (ed.), Wilkie Collins: Interdisciplinary Essays, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007, pp.107-21

Books:

Neo-Victorianism and Sensation Fiction; in preparation; Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Victorian Sensation Fiction: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism; in preparation; Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Charlotte Brontë (Hesperus Brief Lives series). London: Hesperus Press, 2011

Edited Work:

Editor, New Perspectives on Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012

Co-editor, with Mark Llewellyn and Nadine Muller, Women and Belief, 1852-1928, 6 vols, Routledge ‘Major Works’ History of Feminism Series, 2012

Co-editor, with Alexia Bowler, Neo-Victorian Studies, special issue: Adapting the Nineteenth Century: Revisiting, Revising and Rewriting the Past, Vol. 2, No. 2, Winter 2009/2010

Editor and notes, Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (London: Penguin Classics, 2006)

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