Lyrics as Literature: Poetic Storytelling and the Construction of Female Identity in Taylor Swift’s Lyrics

Abstract

"This thesis examines Taylor Swift’s song lyrics as a form of poetic storytelling and explores how female identity is constructed across different phases of her songwriting career. Situating song lyrics within the framework of lyrics-as-literature, the study addresses the growing scholarly recognition of popular music as a legitimate site of literary and cultural analysis. Drawing on a qualitative, literature-based research design, the thesis synthesizes existing scholarship and conducts close readings of ten representative songs selected from three broadly recognized phases of Swift’s artistic development: early confessional storytelling, persona-driven and media-reflexive narration, and later symbolic and introspective lyricism. The analysis employs an integrated three-layer framework combining narratology, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), including feminist and postfeminist perspectives. This framework enables a systematic examination of narrative structure, linguistic patterning, and gendered discourse as interrelated components of meaning-making. The findings demonstrate that Swift’s lyrics function as a coherent poetic system rather than a spontaneous emotional confession, with each phase marked by distinct narrative strategies, grammatical tendencies, and discursive constructions of femininity. Across her body of work, female identity is shown to evolve from emotionally legible and morally innocent femininity, through confrontation with media discourse and gendered power relations, to a reflexive mode shaped by internalized surveillance and self-interrogation. By integrating narrative, linguistic, and discursive analysis, this study contributes to interdisciplinary scholarship on popular music, feminist discourse, and literary studies, and highlights the value of song lyrics as complex cultural texts that negotiate contemporary female identity."