The Literary Taylor Swift

Songwriting and Intertextuality

Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol, Anastasia Klimchynskaya

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9798765104514
• eBook ISBN: 9798765104521
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory

Taylor Swift, arguably the most prolific and acclaimed singer-songwriter of the 21st century, has shaped her listeners' collective consciousness and challenged her industry's often limiting attitudes toward genre, revision, and collaboration.

Although Swift is a perennial subject in the media, cast in both a positive and a negative light, few professional scholars have considered her ever-growing body of work. The Literary Taylor Swift examines Swift's significance and timeliness through literary analysis and theory.

Taylor Swift has been celebrated for her ability to craft immersive narratives and to articulate, with lyrical acuity, a broad range of emotional experiences, and her lyrics underscore her profound relationship with text. The Literary Taylor Swift explores Swift's engagements, intertextual and otherwise, with literature and treats her songs as literature-as, that is, stories, poems, and other textual forms to which literary-critical theories and methodologies can and should be productively applied. This collection offers carefully curated arguments constellated around four key relationships: Swift and the literary-historical canon; Swift and the language of gender and sexuality; Swift and the relationship between writing and memory; and Swift and the nature of literary craft.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction—Blank Spaces, Fresh Pages: Taylor Swift and/as Literature
• Part 1 All of the Books Beside Your Bed: Engaging the Literary-Historical Canon
• 1 “I haven’t met the new me yet”: folklore/evermore and Taylor Swift’s Self-Fashioned Renaissance
• 2 Big Reputation: Reading Taylor Swift with Eighteenth-Century Women Writers
• 3 “Just to break me like a promise”: Taylor Swift as Ridiculous Romantic Heroine
• 4 “What are my ‘Wordsworth’?”: Taylor Swift’s New Romanticism
• 5 Baby, We’re the Late Romantics: Taylor Swift and the English Biedermeier
• 6 Modernist Intertextualities in folklore and evermore
• Part 2 Every Version of Yourself Tonight: Examining Gender, Sexuality, and Race
• 7 The Death of the Pop Auteur: Taylor Swift’s Feminist Politics of Collaboration and Revision
• 8 “No one likes a mad woman”: The Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Trope and/as Feminist Resistance in Taylor Swift’s Music and Mythology
• 9 Female Millennial Rage: The Weaponization of Cottagecore
• 10 “She would’ve made such a lovely bride”: Queer Anxieties on folklore and evermore
• 11 What It Means to Shake It Off: Taylor Swift, Race, and Citizenship
• Part 3 Time, Curious Time: (Re-)Writing Memory
• 12 “Time, curious time”: Time, Memory, and Agency in Taylor Swift
• 13 “Say you’ll remember me . . . all too well”: Taylor Swift’s Memory Work
• 14 “Scrap[s] of you”: Fabrics of Memory in folklore and evermore
• 15 “The corner I haunt”: Trauma, Time, and Space in Taylor Swift’s Post-Hiatus Oeuvre
• Part 4 This Ain’t a Fairy Tale: Considering Craft, Genre, and Mediation
• 16 Show, Don’t Tell? How Taylor Swift Complicates a Writing Cliché
• 17 “I never knew I could feel that much”: Taylor Swift’s Recuperative Aesthetics of Excess
• 18 “Making the stone stony”: The Paradox of Defamiliarization and Hyperfamiliarity in Taylor Swift’s Songwriting
• 19 “This is me trying”: Autofiction and Taylor Swift
• 20 (Taylor’s Version): Authenticity and Aura in Taylor Swift’s Re-Recordings
• Contributors
• Index
• Copyright