Medea Book

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 BrottonRead More