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.

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.

This interdisciplinary volume explores the ancient Greek myth of Medea and its global analogues found in other mythic and folk tales of deadly, exiled women, such as those of La Malinche and La Llorona, examining the connections between these figures and their depictions from antiquity to modernity. The book considers the figure of the foreign woman, her exile, fratricide, and infanticide, in its ancient Greek form and in global, postcolonial receptions in a range of media, including drama, film, novels, and the visual arts. The chapters illuminate the contradictions of considering the classical Medea as a central reference point for analysis of other female figures from peripheral territories, while simultaneously acknowledging the insights that such comparisons can yield. Emphasizing the ways in which Medea’s seditious nature enables the establishment of an extensive and heterogeneous intertextual network with other mythic characters who represent a similarly disruptive role in their specific local historical and cultural contexts, the book argues for a comparative analysis that is equally attentive to myths and folk tales from all regions. These essays – by scholars of classics, comparative and world literatures, and postcolonial studies – represent a plurality of perspectives from different academic contexts in Africa, Latin America, North America, and Europe and examine how different cultures have depicted women, foreigners, crime, and abjection. The foundations of Greek myth and subsequently of the classical tradition itself are interrogated from a postcolonial perspective. In tracing the portrayals of Medea and other mythic women through the overlapping features of different female characters and plots, and intertwining local cultural and literary materials with broader debates, this volume challenges Eurocentric narratives of power and cultural domination, and works to decentralize the discussion of Medea from the exclusive domain of classical studies. Medea’s Long Shadow in Postcolonial Contexts will be of interest to students and scholars working on Greek tragedy and its reception, as well as tomthose studying postcolonial and global approaches to literature, culture, and gender studies.

Seeking the Mothers in Ovid's "Heroides" explores Ovid's reconceptualization of the heroines' maternal experience. Rather than aligning them with the stereotypical roles of Roman women, motherhood enables the Ovidian heroines to challenge traditional norms with irreverent perspectives on gender categories and familial relationships. To confront these perspectives and overcome the dialectic between the (male) voice of the poet and the (female) voice of the heroines, Seeking the Mothers in Ovid's "Heroides" argues for a form of polyphonic "cooperation" between the two voices, thus providing new angles on ironical discourse and gender fluidity within the Heroides. By reading the Heroides both through feminist theory and against Ovid's poetic production, Simona Martorana provides a novel approach to describe how motherhood enhances the heroines' agency, drawing on works of Kristeva, Irigaray, Butler, Mulvey, Cavarero, Braidotti, and Ettinger. The application of theory is flexible throughout Seeking the Mothers in Ovid's "Heroides" and tailored to the nuances of specific passages rather than being uniformly imposed on the ancient text. Seeking the Mothers in Ovid's "Heroides" reveals how the irony, ambiguity, and polyphony intrinsic to Ovid's poetry are amplified by the heroines' poetic voices. Martorana breaks new ground by incorporating contemporary feminist theories within the analysis of the Heroides and provides an original comprehensive analysis of motherhood that encompasses other Ovidian works, Latin poetry, and classical literature more broadly.

The question of ‘identity’ arises for any individual or ethnic group when they come into contact with a stranger or another people. Such contact results in the self-conscious identification of ways of life, customs, traditions, and other forms of society as one’s own specific cultural features and the construction of others as characteristic of peoples from more or less distant lands, described as very ‘different’. Since all societies are structured by the division between the sexes in every field of public and private activity, the modern concept of ‘gender’ is a key comparator to be considered when investigating how the concepts of identity and ethnicity are articulated in the evaluation of the norms and values of other cultures. The object of this book is to analyze, at the beginning Western culture, various examples of the ways the Greeks and Romans deployed these three parameters in the definition of their identity, both cultural and gendered, by reference to their neighbours and foreign nations at different times in their history. This study also aims to enrich contemporary debates by showing that we have yet to learn from the ancients’ discussions of social and cultural issues that are still relevant today.

Decadent Ecology illuminates the networks of nature, paganism, and desire in 19th- and early 20th-century decadent literature and art. Combining the environmental humanities with aesthetic, queer and literary theory, this study reveals the interplay of art, eco-paganism and science during the formation of modern ecological and evolutionary thought.

Ancient tragedy has played a well-documented role in contemporary theatre since the mid-twentieth century. In addition to the often-commented-upon watershed productions, however, is a significant but overlooked history involving classical tragedy in experimental and avant-garde theatre. Postdramatic Tragedies focuses upon such experimental reinventions and analyses receptions of Greek and Roman tragedy that come under the banner of 'postdramatic theatre', a style of performance in which the traditional components of drama, such as character and narrative, are subordinate to the immediate, affective power of more abstract elements, such as image and sound. The chapters are arranged into three parts, each of which explores classical reception within a specific strand of postdramatic theatre: text-based theatre, devised theatre, and theatre that transcends the usual boundaries of time and space, such as durational and immersive theatre. Each offers a semiotic and phenomenological analysis of a particular case study, covering both widely known and less studied productions from 1995 to 2015. Together they reveal that postdramatic theatre is related to the classics at its conceptual core, and that the study of postdramatic tragedies reveals a great deal about both the evolution of theatre in recent decades, and the status of ancient drama in modernity.