Elly McCausland is a professor of English Literature at Ghent University, Belgium. A lifelong Swiftie, she started this blog to document and explore the increasingly literary quality of Swift’s songwriting. This has been the subject of increasing media attention since the release of albums folklore and evermore, which marked Swift’s foray into increasingly experimental songwriting territory and which were marketed around the idea of being unable to stop telling stories:
“I loved the escapism I found in these imaginary/not imaginary tales. I loved the ways you welcomed the dreamscapes and tragedies and epic tales of love lost and found into your lives. So I just kept writing them.”
(Swift on Twitter)
However, discussions of Swift and literature tend to remain confined to the listing of literary allusions. This blog aims to go beyond such enumerations and dive deeper into the multiple interconnections between Swift’s substantial body of work, and the techniques, traditions and tropes of English (that is, Anglophone) literature. These are also the subject of the Masters course, ‘Literature (Taylor’s Version)‘ at Ghent University.
Swifterature 