The Literary Taylor Swift

Book excerpt: 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 through literary analysis and theory. The ability to craft immersive narratives and to articulate, with acuity, a broad range of emotional experiences and a profound relationship with text is one of Taylor Swift's hallmarks. The Literary Taylor Swift explores Swift's engagements, intertextual and otherwise, with literature and treats her songs as literature. Literature as in stories, poems, and other textual forms to which literary-critical theories and methodologies can and should be productively applied. Swift's many self-styled characters are analyzed with and against literary figures and literature, from Swift's focus on reputation as read alongside 18th-century women writers to the crazy ex-girlfriend trope as feminist resistance and Swift's self-fashioned renaissance through folklore (2020) and evermore (2020). 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.