USCA English professor furthers study of Victorian literature

Associate Professor Julie Wise recently participated in a conference and published a journal article analyzing aspects of Victorian-era literature. This work furthers her research and will impact her approach to teaching these topics to her English students.

Wise co-organized an international scholarly conference titled “Fin-de-Siècle Modernisms” on the University of South Carolina Columbia campus on February 28 and March 1. The conference brought together 46 scholars from across North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia to examine the cultural transition when the 19th century merged into the 20th and when literary and cultural modernism first came into place.

“The conference was a chance for those of us who study this era to look at continuities between these two literary movements,” Wise says. “It prompted us to think about instances when ideas from modernist literature appear as early as the 1890s and, in turn, when elements of late-Victorian literature persist well into the 1920s or ‘30s. We were able to examine how we distinguish different literary periods and how we think about the relationship between literature and history.”

The conference was sponsored by the USC Comparative Literature Program, USC Department of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, and USC Walker Institute of International and Area Studies. It follows a graduate seminar on this topic that Wise co-taught in the fall of 2024.

In addition to furthering her personal study, discussion from the conference will help Wise enhance her English curriculum regarding comparisons between various literary periods.e

“It will help my approach to English 289, our British literature survey course, where we look at literary history and how literature merges from one moment to the next,” Wise says. “Seeing exchanges that were taking place at the time, and how writers understood their moment in literary history, certainly affects how we teach it.”

Wise also recently published an article in the Journal of Victorian Culture focusing on Amy Levy’s 1882 “Medea. A Fragment after Euripides.” Wise’s piece analyzes late-Victorian literary decadence, a mode of writing that embraces excess, exaggeration, and ambiguity.

“Ways in which women writers like Levy were using decadence to their end have often been overlooked, but they can contribute to how we understand and teach women’s writing,” Wise says.

Wise’s work follows several earlier journal articles she has published on Victorian women’s poetry. She is also developing a book project on Victorian poets and the ways they evaluate modernity during the transition between centuries. She hopes to have a draft of the book developed within the next year.

Wise’s research interests have focused on Victorian poetry, poetics, aesthetics, gender, and culture beginning with her graduate work at Indiana University. Her intrigue with this period stems from its writers’ focus on their transition to a modern world.

“While the end of the 19th century is often seen as a period contraction, its literature also articulates a lot of hope and possibility about what the world might become,” Wise says. “It can be similar to today’s world when we might find ourselves asking ‘what comes next?’ That’s what these late Victorian writers are also doing. And these are the kinds of similarities I hope students in my literature courses will discover as they read, discuss, and write about these fascinating texts.”

For more information, contact USCA Marketing & Communication at news@usca.edu.