Medea senecana in lingua tedesca tra XVIII secolo e oggi

Senecan Medea in Deutschsprachiger Raum between the 18th century and today Analyzing the persistence of a mythological figure like Medea, who has endured through time and space, is a complex affair. It becomes apparent how the evolution of the heroine over the centuries assumes new meanings and adapts to constantly changing sociocultural contexts. Medea, already present in archaic mythological material, transcends the boundaries of strictly mythological meaning, and initially achieves full canonization in Greek and then in Latin theater. Indeed, through the tragedy of Euripides in 431 BC, a clear and well-recognizable “biographical career” is attributed to her, which later continues with the Senecan tragedy. In this work, the heroine from Colchis increasingly takes on the traits of a perfidious sorceress, approaching the anti-stoic essence of the monster. When she then seems to almost fade into oblivion completely throughout late antiquity and the Middle Ages, Medea later reappears on the international stage of the Renaissance and the Baroque era. Only from the end of the 18th century did Medea become widespread across Europe and proliferate in the new media of the 20th and 21st centuries on all continents. Thus, Medea's power is nurtured by the creative force of writers, dramatists, and librettists. Particularly in the European context, the Medea adaptations in German-speaking areas have so far enjoyed a lesser degree of systematics: they have been excluded from a coherent overall picture that also considered the influence of the archetype. For this reason, I have decided to focus this research work on the rewritings in German: here, literature picks up the classical myth and creates new versions that make use of unique and unrepeatable circumstances. Since the Euripidean tragedy is considered the most viewed tragic archetype, the model used here will be the Senecan tragedy, whose influence on the European and non-European dramaturgical tradition has often been overlooked. The structure of this work includes a first methodological chapter that lays the theoretical foundations for an in-depth analysis of the selected works, which are examined in a diachronic course in the second chapter. This chapter explores the survival of the heroine from the Classical and Medieval period to the modern and contemporary era, with particular attention to the various historical-cultural changes. The aim of this first part is to capture the often elusive, but just as often simply unexamined dependencies, of some German works on each other and from the Latin model. The result of this operation is a chronological and reasoned list of 86 German rewritings from the 18th to the 21st century in the form of a table, which constitutes an appendix to the research work. The second part begins with the third chapter, which contains the analysis of six representative works of different readings: furor and magic in Medea in Corinth (1786) by Friedrich Maximilian Klinger; Love and melodrama in Medea in Corinto (1814) by Johann Simon Mayr; the ethnic and political question in Medea in Prag (1949) by Max Zweig; the postmodern fragmentation in Medeamaterial by Heiner Müller (1983); the gender struggle in Der Schlaf der Vernunft (1984) by Ula Stöckl; and the psychoanalytic interpretation in M., nach Euripides (1984) by George Tabori. The six works selected here are considered exemplary for certain thematic and stylistic aspects and are essential to examine the Medea story from a critical perspective. The final chapter turns its gaze to the 21st century, highlighting the ongoing relevance of Medea as a source of new artistic truths, with a focus on Mein und dein Herz (Medeia) (2007) by Nino Haratischwili. The work concludes with an examination of potential future research directions and developments of the theme. The importance of Medea as a cultural, overarching icon is emphasized, which continues to deserve attention in academic studies.