Jane Austen and Taylor Swift provide smart, formally brilliant takes on crucial social issues. While being hugely popular, particularly with women audiences, and critically praised, each has also been denigrated as “less serious” for their both perceived focus on feminocentric issues and their popularity. In this talk, I read Austen through Swift, with a focus on Pride and Prejudice and the relationship between Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet. Both Austen and Swift are also criticized for presenting and representing specifically white femininity. As a woman of color who is a Swift and Austen fan, I argue for the ways in which Taylor Swift’s lyrics offer a contemporary gloss on Austen’s famous romantic pairing but also for the ways in which popular women’s media expresses themes of love, romance, yearning, and female subjectivity explaining why these stories are universally important and can be read through an intersectional framework.
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Tiffany Franchesca Cruz 