Review of Tontiplaphol & Klimchynskaya (2024): The literary Taylor Swift: Songwriting and intertextuality

There is something of a blank space in the burgeoning area of Taylor Swift studies, suggest Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol and Anastasia Klimchynskaya in the introduction to their edited collection, The Literary Taylor Swift.Several scholars consider Swift as a seminal cultural figure (see, e.g., the articles collected in Fogarty & Arnold 2021 or Morris 2024), but far fewer concentrate on what Tontiplaphol and Klimchynskaya term her "distinctly literary sensibility, […] a dimension of her artistry and persona as significant as her sound, her celebrity, or her business acumen" (p.2; emphasis in original).Countering this, the editors present 20 chapters in which analysis of Swift's oeuvre is informed by the discipline of literary studies, broadly conceived.With a core focus upon the language of Swift's lyrics, the collection can also claim a strong linguistic undercurrent.It thus has much to offer those working in linguistics, most especially critical discourse analysts, pragmaticians and stylisticians.Indeed, chapters draw upon Russian formalism, a forefather of modern-day stylistics, alongside several other theories that resonate with linguistic studyfeminist theory, queer theory and trauma theory among them.Overall, the book represents the first full-length publication to centre around Swift's lyrical output, rather than the singer-songwriter herself.Part I, which is headed "All of the books beside your bed: Engaging the literary-historical canon", comprises six chapters placing Swift's lyrics alongside established literary eras.While these chapters largely focus upon thematic echoes, they often secondarily also identify linguistic commonalities.The various literary eras are addressed chronologically, with Chapter 1 -"'I haven't met the new me yet': folklore/evermore and Taylor Swift's self-fashioned renaissance" by Devori Kimbroaligning Swift's pandemic sister albums, released in 2020, with the sixteenth-century country house poem and Petrarchan sonnet sequence.The following chapter, "Big reputation: Reading Taylor Swift with eighteenth-century women writers" by Bridget Donnelly, continues this critically comparative approach across the centuries, pairing Swift's controversial 2017 album reputation with texts by overlooked eighteenth-century women writers including Francis Brueny and Eliza Haywood.In Chapter 3, "'Just to break me like a promise': Taylor Swift as ridiculous Romantic heroine", Rita J. Dashwood studies the silly