Medea - Softcover

Wolf, Christa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385518579 ISBN 13: 9780385518574

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1998

Synopsis

Medea is among the most notorious women in the canon of Greek tragedy: a woman scorned who sacrifices her own children to her jealous rage. In her gripping new novel, Christa Wolf expands this myth, revealing a fiercely independent woman ensnared in a brutal political battle.

Medea, driven by her conscience to leave her corrupt homeland, arrives in Corinth with her husband, the hero Jason. He is welcomed, but she is branded the outsider--and then she discovers the appalling secret behind the king's claim to power. Unwilling to ignore the horrifying truth about the state, she becomes a threat to the king and his ruthless advisors. Then abandoned by Jason and made a public scapegoat, she is reviled as a witch and a murderess.

Long a sharp-eyed political observer, Christa Wolf transforms this ancient tale into a startlingly relevant commentary on our times. Possessed of the enduring truths so treasured in the classics, and yet with a thoroughly contemporary spin, her Medea is a stunningly perceptive and probingly honest work of fiction.

About this title

Review:

Probably one of the most controversial figures of classical mythology, Medea has fascinated dramatists, poets and historians for centuries. Condemned for supposedly killing her brother to help Jason in his theft of the Golden Fleece, tradition maintains that once spurned by Jason Medea then murdered her own children. For many decades feminist writers have been troubled by Medea the infanticide, but none have tackled the fable with the power and imaginative boldness of one of Germany's greatest post-war writers, Christa Wolf, in her novel Medea: A Modern Retelling.

Told through the compelling dramatic monologues of the main protagonists in Medea's story, including the beautiful Colchian princess herself, the novel is a brilliant modern retelling of the classical fable, which in Wolf's hands takes on painful resonances of the traumatic unification of Germany itself. But ultimately the book is a brilliantly imagined account of how the myth of Medea is created as a result of political expediency and the ways in which the dispossessed princess, and women generally, are invariably the losers, not the winners, in any tradition of myth-making. Wolf has already tackled such issues in her earlier acclaimed novel Cassandra, but Medea is arguably even better. This is a brilliant, monumental novel, which shows the ways in which the myths of the past continue to impinge upon the injustices of the present. --Jerry Brotton

Review:

Rich and rhythmic translation ... Wolf understands the tough poetry of the ancient world, but she reinterprets it with a sensitivity that sets off troubling echoes for the modern age (TIMES)

A chilling, brilliantly layered fable of political corruption, betrayal and scapegoating (RUTH PADEL, MAIL ON SUNDAY)

Concentrated, fervent, authoritative ... a writer who can do almost anything (SUSAN SONTAG)

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0385518579
• ISBN 13: 9780385518574
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208