The same holds true for the growing canon of Taylor Swift, America's sweetheart, not to mention its musical and cultural powerhouse. At least, according to University of Denver English professor Rachel Feder and co-author Tiffany Tatreau in their Tay-Tay treatise Taylor Swift by the Book: The Literature Behind the Lyrics, from Fairy Tales to Tortured Poets.
Feder will be at Tattered Cover Colfax on Thursday, May 22, for a panel with three other writers and educators from DU who'll take on the topic "Forms of Experiment." Feder will also discuss her new collection of poetry, Daisy, which is a new take on Fitzgerald's classic The Great Gatsby, updating it to the 1990s and telling the story through the lens of Daisy herself — an elegy of sorts to the American Dream.
Feder is accustomed to making such cases; in addition to authoring several books, she teaches courses on 18th- and 19th-century British literature with emphases on Romanticism, literary experiment, intellectual history, women writers, and the Gothic. Her co-author, Tiffany Tatreau, is a stage actress (currently starring in the road production of A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical) and Swift superfan, who also happens to be Feder’s sister-in-law.
The cover of Taylor Swift By the Book: The Literature Behind the Lyrics, from Fairy Tales to Tortured Poets.
Quirk Books
The Swiftian fandom is notorious for being on the intense side, but the jump from starry-eyed affection to an intellectual examination of a discography through a literary lens is a whole other Love Story. "There was a serious snowball effect," recalls Tatreau. "We went from creating this small thing and grabbing lines and making notes here and there to suddenly realizing we had too much, that we could take it all on. It was a cool discovery."
"And we go hard," laughs Feder.
Fans know All Too Well that it was Taylor Swift herself, of course, that first divided her eleven studio albums into 10 distinct “eras” during her most recent tour of the same name. Feder and Tatreau used that as both inspiration and structure for their book, assigning each of Swift’s eras to a literary era: Swift's self-titled debut album is placed into the book's Bildungsroman era; Fearless and Speak Now are defined as the fairy tale era; Red and 1989 are modernist, and so forth, ending most contemporaneously with The Tortured Poets Department defining post-modernism.
But the book isn't just categorization: Feder and Tatreau pored through every line of every song from "Tim McGraw" to "The Manuscript" in order to illuminate and expand upon the songwriter’s literary references. Each era even ends with a suggested reading list: if a reader connects strongly with the eponymous Taylor Swift album, they might enjoy Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming. If they're more in tune with "Tortured Poets," perhaps that fan would enjoy Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen or Anodyne by Khadijah Queen. And those are only a few examples out of dozens of recommended books and poetry collections.
"I'm really interested in how literary history shapes our shared cultural mythologies," says Feder. "So I'm super interested in figures like Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen, and Taylor Swift, whose writing becomes really representative. They're doing this work at the intersection of gender and genre. Swift is so clearly operating in that same tradition, that poetess tradition."
Feder says that when she teaches an Introduction to literary studies, she asks the class if there are any Swifties present. "Maybe six students raise their hand," Feder says, "and that's just the six that had the courage to put up their hand. But I point to those students who did, and say, 'Okay, you all are already close readers.' Because the incidental enterprise of digging into song lyrics, parsing them, working to define alternate meanings and conflicting meanings, to connect motifs and diction and allusion and find narrative throughlines. That's all the practice of close reading. There's something really fun about Swiftie fandom from a literary studies perspective. It's already so exegetically based."
"If I've learned one thing in my years of Taylor Swift listening," says Tatreau, "it's that I never know what she's going to do next. She's thinking bigger than I could ever think about her career and her work, and I think that's so exciting. I've just learned to expect that I'll love whatever comes next. All I know is that I can't wait to see what it is."
Feder agrees and brings it back to the idea of the poetess in culture. "There's this idea that the poetess is always present and performing this collective identity moment," she says. "But the more you try to grab onto her or define what she's doing, the more she disappears. And in that moment, what's left there in the confetti of the memory of the music is you. You've had this profound experience of a work of art that's taught you something about yourself. The question isn't so much about what Taylor Swift will do next, but rather where will her art meet us next?"
Taylor Swift By the Book: The Literature Behind the Lyrics, from Fairy Tales to Tortured Poets is available now. Rachel Feder will appear at Tattered Cover, 2526 Colfax Avenue, at 6 p.m. on Thursday, May 22, where she'll be available to sign copies of both this book and her new collection Daisy; admission is free, but registration is required.
