Intensely Original

Abstract

The story of Beauty and her beast is truly a tale as old as time: a beautiful girl falls in love with a beast and her love transforms him into a prince. This project is framed by Joosen’s (2011) argument regarding fairy tale retellings disrupting Jauss and Benzinger’s (1970) claim that fairy tales and retellings align with the horizon of expectations. Using Kemmerer’s A Curse so Dark and Lonely (2019), a “Beauty and the Beast” retelling, this essay tests Joosen’s (2011) theory to determine if the retelling remains true to or diverges from the original parent material.

Keywords

• fairytale retellings
• Beauty and the Beast
• critical content analysis
• horizons of expectation
• young adult literature
• fantasy, strong female characters