Taylor Swift as Storyteller

“To capture the rich text of Taylor Swift’s life and work—one the star is constantly writing in collaboration with critics, collaborators, and fans—Alison Halsall brings together diverse perspectives on Swift’s often contradictory stardom, illuminating not only Swift herself but the cultural and political landscape that has emerged around her. Considering race and gender, songcraft and fandom, physical media and digital communities, and more, Taylor Swift as Storyteller puts one of the defining figures of our century under the microscope in service of illuminating our dizzying culture.” —Nate Sloan, coauthor of Switched on Pop: How Popular Music Works and Why it Matters

“Taylor Swift as Storyteller is a kaleidoscopic assessment of the interaction between Swift’s music and actions and the shifting affordances of an enormous range of mediated options and platforms. Swift’s spectacular success story enlivens and enriches our understanding of popular culture, media literacies, consumer capitalism, gender, power, and intellectual property.” —Margaret Mackey, author of Space, Place, and Children’s Reading Development: Mapping the Connections

“Halsall and contributors fill an important need for theoretically sophisticated scholarly work on Taylor Swift suitable for classroom use. With its contemporary case study for examining questions of audience and cultural power, this book will be of interest to scholars working in popular culture, celebrity, fandom, media, and narratology.” —Addie Mahmassani, author of Air Split Open: Odetta, Joan Baez, and the American Folk Movement

Examines Taylor Swift as a nexus of music, media, fandom, and branding, revealing how her enterprise reflects and reshapes contemporary culture.

Taylor Swift as Storyteller examines one of the most influential cultural figures of the twenty-first century as both artist and “star text,” arguing that Swift’s global impact is shaped through the dynamic interplay of music, media, fandom, and branding. Bringing together literary scholars, ethnographers, and musicologists, this collection positions Swift as not just a pop figure but a transmedial construct.

Contributors explore how Swift’s carefully curated personae—from girl-next-door to feminist icon to “tortured poet”—generate powerful affective connections with audiences while also functioning as strategic marketing tools. At the same time, contributors retheorize authorship and control in the digital age. By foregrounding the roles of management, branding, and platform circulation, and by interrogating the participatory roles of Swifties as cocreators of meaning, Taylor Swift as Storyteller complicates the idea of singular authorship. Attending to questions of feminism, authorship, nostalgia, and literary adaptation, this collection ultimately reveals how Swift’s enterprise both reflects and reshapes contemporary media culture, illuminating the complex relationship between narrative, identity, and power in the digital age.

Contributors:
Natalie Abbott, Alexander Carpenter, Zixiao Chen, Katie E. Cline, Jennifer Duggan, Rachel M. Friars, Andrea LeMahieu Glaws, Wendy J. Glenn, Alison Halsall, Roxanne Harde, Juliette Holder, Erika Kvistad, Zhimou Li, Sarah E. Maier, Catherine McCarthy, Elly McCausland, Laura Carman McClintock, Adrianna Mirabal, Linh S. Nguyễn, Hazel O’Brien, Anah-Jayne Samuelson, L. M. Schmidt, Katlin Marisol Sweeney-Romero

Alison Halsall is Associate Professor of Humanities at York University. She is the author of Growing Up Graphic: The Comics of Children in Crisis and coeditor of The LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader: Critical Openings, Future Directions, winner of the 2023 Eisner Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Work.

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: Taylor Swift and Transmedial Storytelling
• Part 1: Bracelets and Belonging: Swift’s Fan Communities and the Stories They Tell
  • Chapter 1 “You’re On Your Own, Kid”: Competition, Consumption, and Community in Taylor Swift’s Fandoms
  • Chapter 2 Clowns on a Quest: Swift’s Games as Ludonarrative
  • Chapter 3 “The Internet Itself Is Just One Giant Taylor Swift Tumblr Page”: A Case Study of Swiftie Tumblr in 2025
  • Chapter 4 “I’ve Got a Blank Space, Baby”: Strategizing Foucauldian Heterotopia in Swiftian Lore
  • Chapter 5 Black and Latina Swifties “Come Back Stronger Than a ’90s Trend”: The Intracultural Spaces Between Swift’s Fans on Social Media
  • Chapter 6 Embracing the Bad Blood: Exploring the Emotional Resonance of Swift’s Vengeance-Themed Songs for Chinese Audiences
• Part 2: Electric Touch: The Reach of Swift’s Affective Songwriting and Storytelling
  • Chapter 7 Swift’s Songcraft and Musical Storytelling
  • Chapter 8 Taylor Swift and the Legitimization of Heartbreak: Implications for Feminist Knowledge-Making
  • Chapter 9 Reclaiming the Voice by Securing the Body: Using Embodied Rhetoric to Understand Swift’s Emerging Activist Voice
  • Chapter 10 “When You Say I Seem Angry”: Swift, Feminism, and Politics
  • Chapter 11 The Reputation of Swift: Creation, Adaptation, and Contestation
  • Chapter 12 “When You Are Young, They Assume You Know Nothing”: Constructions of Youth in the Folklore Love Triangle
• Part 3: Quills and Manuscripts: Representation and the Adaptation of Popular and Literary Culture
  • Chapter 13 “But if the Story’s Over / Why Am I Still Writing Pages?”: Swift and Popular Literary Culture
  • Chapter 14 Clocking In: Fabricated Nostalgia, Material Media, and the Value of Work in Swift’s Midnights
  • Chapter 15 “If I Were a (Mad Wo)man”: Taylor Swift’s Neo-Victorianism
  • Chapter 16 The Reclamation of Agency Through Driving in the Lyrics of Taylor Swift
• Afterword
• Contributors List
• Index