Abstract
This chapter begins by comparing retellings for young people from early and late in the twentieth century to demonstrate the influence of patriarchal vs feminist metanarratives on the Lady/Elaine story. The latter part of the chapter analyzes Marjorie Richardson’s “Launcelot’s Tower,” L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, Felicity Pulman’s Shalott series, and Meg Cabot’s Avalon High. These texts depict young women reading the Lady/Elaine to model ways to engage with cultural and social constructions of femininity, providing textual moments that are sites of resistance to cultural norms.
Parts of this chapter appeared earlier in “Reading Elaine: Marjorie Richardson’s and L. M. Montgomery’s Red-haired Lily Maids” in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly (Howey 2007). That article includes fuller discussion of the material conditions of publication and audience for both Richardson’s and Montgomery’s texts.
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Howey, A.F. (2020). Reading and Resisting: The Lady/Elaine in Young People’s Literature. In: Afterlives of the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat. Arthurian and Courtly Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47690-8_6
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