Title:  Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South
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Author:  Steven Weisenburger
Steven Weisenburger, professor of English and codirector of the Program in American Culture at the University of Kentucky, is the author of Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel and A Gravity's Rainbow Companion.

Publisher:  Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Incorporated
Date Published:  September 1999

Format:  Trade Paper
25 Black-and-White Illustrations Notes/Bibliography/Index

ABOUT THE BOOK

Synopsis
The widely acclaimed inquiry into the story that inspired Toni Morrison's Beloved. One frigid Sunday night in January 1856, a twenty-two-year-old Kentucky slave named Margaret Garner gathered up her family and raced north, toward freedom. Soon, however, the Garners were discovered in their sanctuary, and Margaret turned on her children with a knife rather than see them sent back to a life of slavery. Steven Weisenburger is the first scholar to delve into the astonishing story of Margaret Garner's child-murder in more than a century.

His dramatic narrative paints a nuanced portrait of the not-so-genteel Southern culture that perpetuated slavery and had such destructive effects on all who lived with it and in it.

Annotation
25 Black-and-White Illustrations Notes/Bibliography/Index

Description form the Reader's Catalog
A historical account of the events that inspired Toni Morrison's Beloved. In 1856, Margaret Garner sought to escape with her children from slavery; when her master caught up with her, she killed her two-year-old daughter saying she would rather see her children dead than captive. Her subsequent trial for child-murder became a cause celbre for both abolitionists and slaveholders

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