Mapping Medea

Abstract This introductory chapter outlines the overall aims of the volume and its theoretical perspectives and provides analysis of the ancient sources. It begins with an overview of Medea at the hands of colonial Europe and a discussion of the close (and often deliberate) parallels between Medea and the hugely popular Inkle and Yarico story, first published in The Spectator in 1711 and then subsequently regularly reworked in multiple media throughout the century. The middle section delineates the 1750–1800 focus and the significance of the synchronic approach at a moment of revolutionary change that precipitated the migration of ideas and people across borders, despite or even because of emergent geopolitical boundaries. It concludes with an outline of the volume’s bi-part structure: encompassing the context of expanding empires of the late eighteenth century in the first section to aesthetic transgression and innovation in the second.