I'm almost to the end of Betsy Hearne's Beauty and the Beast, which is a literary comparison of a number of BatB retellings. The final chapter is "Into the Future", where she speculates how the story will come to be understood.
This is 1989, and she has no inkling that Disney is about to make us all its guest. Understandable. In the future, as she sees it, BatB (and other fairy tales) will continue to be relegated to children's media and, implicitly, undeserving of serious study. She thinks this is a terrible outcome, and I agree. By all means, give children's media serious review.
But because she doesn't foresee Disney's tale as old as time, she can't know that following 1991 there will be an explosion of BatB retellings for both the YA and adult markets. I don't know if this wave (possibly multiple waves at this point) of retellings has been the subject of scholarly analysis. I hope so. I hope someday in the future, people care enough to look back and try to figure out what exactly was going on in all our heads.
Hearne advises against oversimplifying your interpretations of fairy tales, and hopefully future scholars will give us our due, however questionable our romantasy might be.
