Abstract

Although there has been critical analysis of Richey Edwards’ lyrics on The Manic Street Preachers 1994 post-punk album The Holy Bible (see Jones, Lukas and Wodkte, 2016) there has been little analysis of his final published lyrics from the folder that Edwards left prior to his disappearance, as used for the 2009 album Journal For Plague Lovers (JFPL). As Wodkte (2016), states in her chapter in Tryptych: Three Studies Of Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible, ‘JFPL uses the body and skin as texts of difficult knowledge and abjection’ (Wodkte, 2016: 325). Over the course of JFPL’s lyrics the human form is dissected, distorted and eventually the physical envelope is ruptured. The narrative offered by each album track is considered in order to examine this. This article expands on the small number of previous analyses of Edwards’ lyrics (e.g. Wodtke, 2016) in two ways. 1) It contrasts JFPL to Giacomo Botta’s (2009) model for understanding modes of artistic output (considering textscapes, soundscapes and landscapes). 2) This article builds on applications of Greenblatt’s (1983) concept of ‘self-fashioning’ in relation to JFPL. The article concludes that in Edwards’ lyrics a number of metaphors reconfigure the malleability of the physical body and expand the concept of how self-fashioning can be applied in relation to it.