Reimagining Forever...: The Marriage Plot in Recent Young Adult Literature

Author
Publication year
2020
Pages
156-170
Comment

From the introduction:

In "Reimagining Forever...: The Marriage Plot in Recent Young Adult Literature," Sara K. Day examines the trope of early marriage in YA romance novels, maintaining the concept of permanence of young and even first love as the desired outcome of adolescence. Using a postfeminist lens, Day analyzes the conversations and cultural contexts surrounding marriage in the twenty-first century. She notes that many YA novels (mis)use classic "marriage plot" novels such as Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, and Pride and Prejudice as templates, while ignoring or erasing the subversive elements of those narratives in order to privilege a traditional upper-class heteronormative understanding of marriage as the natural "happy ending" of a romance. (xx)