Lana Del Rey: An Iconography (Bloomsbury 2025)

This monograph is under contract to Bloomsbury for publication in 2025.

As an iconographic study of Lana del Rey, this book will push back against autobiographical readings of her persona and work (which serve to undermine her artistic agency).

I argue that Del Rey is the quintessential post 9/11 artist whose work reveals that American identity is predicated on mythical and pernicious images that feed into late capitalist identity.

I argue that Del Rey’s work is intimately bound up with psychoanalytic notions of the death drive and paranoid structures of projection and introjection, and that, as such, her invocation of clichés, intertextual references, and American iconographies drawn from sources as foundational to American white identity as frontier narratives to the ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood is manifestly complex.

This study aims to reveal the extent to which American cultural identity, for Del Rey, is both recursive and bound up with death and violence at its very core; indeed, that this is precisely the nature of her use of iconographies of whiteness, her use of the obsolete image and its aesthetic, and her insistence on the inextricable connection between American high and low cultures.

As such, Del Rey is an artist of acute crisis, fracture, exhaustion, repetition, and breakdown who responds intimately and affectively to the American political moment and the slow cancellation of the future.