Transforming Beauty and the Beast: literary and typographic adaptations of an ancient tale

This project focuses on a well-known narrative: Beauty and the Beast and its mythic predecessor Cupid and Psyche. It explores theories of adaptation as it applies to these stories, discusses why these particular stories have remained compelling throughout the modern era, and examines ideas of adaptation within an expressive typographic framework, challenging the relationship between narrator and reader. The project includes a discussion of the specific advantages of typography in its expressive form, and its ability to provide a new visual adaptation of literary works. Finally, this project explores the relationship between the oral and written word in storytelling, and examines whether the written word can form polyphonic visual language that establishes a dialogue, or relationship, between the storyteller and reader. A second component of this project includes three artist’s books which provide original examples of typographic adaptations of the three stories in question.