At fourteen years old, I took a job as a cashier at a Christian bookstore. The owners were Christian fundamentalist-lite, whereas I was coerced by my parents to attend a…
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Issue 5: Formalism Unbound, Part 2, Peer Reviewed Articles
Issue 5: Formalism Unbound, Part 2, Peer Reviewed Articles
Furnishing the Novel, Feeding the Soul: Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Dickens sees human beings with the most intense vividness, but he sees them always in private life, as ‘characters’, not as functional members of society; that is to say, he…
Contemporaries Essays, Tis the Damn Season: Taylor Swift's evermore
Old Romantics
folklore and evermore revisit the Lake District of first-generation Romantic English authors William Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy, and their mutual friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Swift is also influenced by American…
Contemporaries Essays, Tis the Damn Season: Taylor Swift's evermore
folklore 2: folklore harder with a vengeance
If I were granted a retrospective COVID time travel wish, I would have hibernated through 2020, emerging every couple of months to stock up on snacks and the new Taylor…
Contemporaries Essays, Tis the Damn Season: Taylor Swift's evermore
Somethin’ ‘Bout a Truck
Until evermore, there hadn’t been a truck in a Taylor Swift song since her eponymous debut. On Taylor Swift, she spends a lot of time in trucks. The lost love…
Contemporaries Essays, Tis the Damn Season: Taylor Swift's evermore
Zelda, Daisy, Taylor: Beautiful Fools?
That Taylor Swift makes two references to The Great Gatsby on her new album is perhaps the least surprising element of this surprise release. F. Scott Fitzgerald is Swift’s favorite…
Contemporaries Essays, Tis the Damn Season: Taylor Swift's evermore
Spirit Photography
Earlier this year, my partner and I took a day trip to Brighton. It rained the entire time, the storm striping the sky black and grey like a mackerel’s back….
Contemporaries Essays, Tis the Damn Season: Taylor Swift's evermore
History as Metaphor
In her October Rolling Stone interview with Paul McCartney, Taylor Swift said, “when I was making folklore, I went lyrically in a total direction of escapism and romanticism. And I…
Contemporaries Essays, Tis the Damn Season: Taylor Swift's evermore
Some New Shit
evermore is Taylor Swift’s most explicit album to date.1 To use my favorite euphemism for profanity, there is a lot of language: six out of the fifteen tracks display the “explicit”…
Contemporaries Essays, Tis the Damn Season: Taylor Swift's evermore
Slow, Swift Grief
I seek the company of women through my year of magical thinking.1 Friends who walk, friends who swim, friends who sip coffee outside in any weather. Swift takes her “insurmountable…