Medea in Politics from 1750 to 1800, with Anna Albrektson

Abstract

Classical characters had an almost overwhelming cultural presence in eighteenth-century Europe, and Medea was no exception. In the short period between 1750 and the turn of the nineteenth century, one of the most complex characters from Greek myth appeared all over Europe, from French tragedies to Swedish operas and German melodramas. But why would a woman who kills her children be ubiquitous on European stages at a moment defined by tender motherhood and the invention of childhood? In this episode, Dr Anna Albrektson from Stockholm University talks to Shivaike Shah about how the ever-transforming representations of Medea in this period can help us to trace major cultural changes during this portion of European history. How does Medea highlight the ambiguity of the Enlightenment world, and in what ways did she interact with wider political contexts like empire and slavery? Dr Albrektson argues that combining the study of this epoch with a transnational perspective reveals that the granddaughter of Helios held a key position in the revolutionary eighteenth century.

Bibliography

open-source

APGRD (Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama) Medea, A Performance History

Anna Albrektson, ‘A New Medea: Staging Conjugal Passion in Eighteenth-Century Europe’, in Carl Niekerk & Monika Nenon (eds.), Lessing Yearbook/Jahrbuch, Vol. XLIV (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2017), 89-106

paywalled

Edith Hall, ‘Medea on the Eighteenth-Century London Stage’, in Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh & Oliver Taplin (eds.), Medea in Performance 1500-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 49-74

Edith Hall & Fiona Macintosh, ‘Greek Tragedy as She-Tragedy’, in ibid., Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 64-98

Yixu Lü, ‘Tranformations of Medea on the Eighteenth-Century German Stage’, in Heike Bartel & Anne Simon (eds.), Unbinding Medea: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Classical Myth from Antiquity to the 21st Century (Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2010), 148-160

Amy Wygant, ‘Revolutionary Medea’, in Heike Bartel & Anne Simon (eds.), Unbinding Medea: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Classical Myth from Antiquity to the 21st Century (Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2010), 136-147

Transcript

You can find a full transcript of the episode here.