Beauty: A Retelling of Beauty and the Beast

Identify two or three examples of foreshadowing in the text. Are these examples reliable, or do they create false expectations? Can Beauty and the other characters intervene and change the course of events? Why or why not?

In Beast’s magical library, Beauty reads about technology from the future, revealing that the story takes place before steam engines and telephones are invented. In what ways would the story be different if it were set in the 1970s when Beauty was written and published? What additional themes and ideas might these changes support?

How does Beauty’s nickname employ irony to develop the text’s themes? Based on what the Background section reveals about feminist fairy tale retellings, what did the author accomplish by using Beauty’s name differently than in previous versions of the tale?