In The Wake Of Medea

Through the figure of Medea, shows how important violence was for seventeenth-century French tragedy and contextualizes that violence in a longer literary and philosophical history from Ovid to Pasolini.

In the Wake of Medea examines the violence of seventeenth-century French political dramas. French tragedy has traditionally been taken to be a passionless, cerebral genre that refused all forms of violence. This book explores the rhetorical, literary, and performance strategies through which violence persists, contextualizing it in a longer literary and philosophical history from Ovid to Pasolini. The mythological figure of Medea, foreigner who massacres her brother, murders kings, burns down Corinth, and kills her own children, exemplifies the persistence of violence in literature and art. A refugee who is welcomed yet feared, who confirms the social while threatening its integrity, Medea offers an alternative to western philosophy’s ethical paradigm of Antigone. The Medean presence, Cherbuliez shows, offers a model of radically persistent and disruptive outsiderness, both for classical theater and for its wake in literary theory. In the Wake of Medea explores a range of artistic strategies integrating violence into drama, from rhetorical devices like ekphrasis to dramaturgical mechanisms like machinery, all of which involve temporal disruption. The full range of this Medean presence is explored in treatments of the character Medea and in works figuratively invoking a Medean presence, from the well-known tragedies of Racine and Corneille through a range of other neoclassical political theater, including spectacular machine plays, Neo-Stoic parables, didactic Christian theater. In the Wake of Medea recognizes the violence within these tragedies to explain why violence remains so integral to literature and arts today.

The central episode in the Portuguese rewritings of Medea is the break between the Asiatic princess and Jason, on the one hand, and Medea’s killing of their children in retaliation, on the other. The enthusiasm for the great classical plots and the challenge to remodel the Classics are the main motivation behind the Portuguese rewritings.

The late-eighteenth century witnessed multiple Medeas take to the stages of Europe, in the Americas, and across the Russian empire. Performances took place in Moscow and São Paulo, in London and Lisbon, in Gotha, Stuttgart, and Venice. This lively collection of essays examines the various reasons why Medea, the ancient mother who killed her own children, attracted the attention of authors, audiences, actors, and rulers in Europe and its dominions during the pivotal period 1750 to 1800, and to what effects. As a migrant and iconoclast, Medea crosses a number of eighteenth-century borders: linguistic, cultural, national, temporal, spatial, aesthetic, ethical, and generic. Moreover, the fact that late-eighteenth-century playwrights, poets, composers, and choreographers all turned to one of the most problematic characters of Greco-Roman antiquity offers a unique opportunity to examine the remarkable flexibility of the reception process itself. Medea therefore functions as an intriguing case study, reflecting a wider context of cultural and political change within Europe and its colonies in the late-eighteenth century. By drawing together eighteenth-century specialists working across multiple languages and disciplines with the reception perspective of classical scholars, this volume brings much rare material from a range of archives across continental Europe to critical attention for the first time. Mapping Medea shows how the eighteenth century made Medea modern, and Medea helped to shape modern performance.

Medea - simply to mention her name conjures up echoes and cross-connections from Antiquity to the present. The vengeful wife, the murderess of her own children, the frail, suicidal heroine, the archetypal Bad Mother, the smitten maiden, the barbarian, the sorceress, the abused victim, the case study for a pathology. For more than two thousand years, she has arrested the eye in paintings, reverberated in opera, called to us from the stage. She demands the most interdisciplinary of study, from ancient art to contemporary law and medicine; she is no more to be bound by any single field of study than by any single take on her character. The contributors to this wide-ranging volume are Brian Arkins, Angela J. Burns, Anthony Bushell, Richard Buxton, Peter A. Campbell, Margherita Carucci, Daniela Cavallaro, Robert Cowan, Hilary Emmett, Edith Hall, Laurence D. Hurst, Ekaterini Kepetzis, Ivar Kvistad, Catherine Leglu, Yixu Lue, Edward Phillips, Elizabeth Prettejohn, Paula Straile-Costa, John Thorburn, Isabelle Torrance, Terence Stephenson, and Amy Wygant.

THE ACCLAIMED TRANSLATION BY ROBIN ROBERTSON (FORWARD PRIZE, MAN BOOKER PRIZE SHORTLIST 2018) Euripides' Medea, the brutally powerful ancient Greek tragedy that reverberates down the centuries, has been brought to fresh and urgent life by one of our best modern poets. Medea has been betrayed. Her husband Jason has left her for a younger woman. He has forgotten all the promises he made and is even prepared to abandon their two sons. But Medea is not a woman to accept such disrespect passively. Strong-willed and fiercely intelligent, she turns her formidable energies to working out the greatest, and most horrifying, revenge possible... Suitable for the general reader as well as for students and performers. 'In Robertson's lucid, free-running verse, Medea's power is released into the world, fresh and appalling, in words that seem spoken for the first time' Anne Enright 'This version of Medea is vivid, strong, readable and brings triumphantly into modern focus the tragic sensibility of the ancient Greeks' John Banville 'Robertson's achievement is to make the dialogue flow without losing the unsettling poetry of the original' Financial Times

The figure of Medea has inspired artists in all fields throughout the centuries. This work examines the major representations of Medea in myth, art, and ancient and contemporary literature, as well as the philosophical, psychological and cultural questions these portrayals raise.

Student edition of Euripedes' classic in which an abandoned, mistreated wife exacts revenge by killing her children.