E. Jane Hedley

Jane Hedley is K. Laurence Stapleton Professor of English. Her teaching specialty is English Literature of the Early Modern Period. In 1988 she published Power in Verse , a study of English lyric poetry from Wyatt to Donne; she has also published essays on individual poets (Gascoigne, Sidney, Greville, Shakespeare's sonnets) and on Shakespeare's As You Like It .

Professor Hedley did her graduate work at Bryn Mawr, with a Ph.D. dissertation on Spenser's Faerie Queene . She still teaches the Faerie Queene as often as possible--most recently in an upper-level course on "Spenserian Allegory." At the 200-level she offers "Renaissance Literature: Performances of Gender," a course that uses lyric poetry, plays and prose writings of the period to look at how men and women understood, performed and subverted gender prerogatives and gender difference.

Professor Hedley's current research deals with the ways in which American women poets since 1945 have negotiated "the gender of poethood." She is working on a book with chapters on Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich and Gwendolyn Brooks, parts of which have already been published in the journal Raritan . She is also co-editing a collection of essays on women's ekphrastic poetry.   She regularly offers a course on Women Poets, subtitled "Giving Eurydice a Voice," whose focus changes every couple of years. She also teaches regularly in the College Seminar Program.

In her spare time Professor Hedley sings madrigals and motets with the Bryn Mawr Renaissance Choir.
 

Publications

Power in Verse: Metaphor and Metonymy in the Renaissance Lyric (Penn State Press, 1988)

"Shakespeare's Sonnets and the Poetics of Narcissism," Style, 28 (Spring 1994): 1-30.

"Narrative and Cultural Identity in the Mixed-Language Writings of Irena Klepfisz and Gloria Anzaldua," Narrative, 4.1 (January, 1996): 30-54.

"Sylvia Plath's Ekphrastic Poetry." Raritan, 20.4 (Spring 2001):   37-73.

" 'I'll tell you something': Reader Address in Louise Glück's Ararat Sequence."                         Literature Compass 2 (2005): AM 164, 1-7.  

Courses Taught:
210 - Renaissance Literature: Performances of Gender
284 - Women Poets (crosslisted w/Feminist & Gender Studies)
361 - Transformations of the Sonnet from Petrarch to Marilyn Hacker

316 - Spenserian Allegory
 

Also on BMC Web:
http://www.brynmawr.edu/Adm/new/election/hedley.html
A review of Rey Chow, Ethics After Idealism: Theory--Culture--Ethnicity--Reading , in BRYN MAWR REVIEW OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

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