The Absent Mother in the Cultural Imagination

1. Introduction.- 2. The Lady Vanishes: The Rise of the Spectral Mother.- 3. Saintly Protection: The Post-Mortem 'Mothers'of Medieval Hagiography.- 4. 'Be War Be My Wo': Gaynour and Her Mother in The Awntyrs off Arthure.- 5. 'A dumme thynge': The Posthumous Voice as Rhetoric in the Mothers' Legacies of Dorothy Leigh and Elizabeth Joscelin.- 6. Dead Mothers and Absent Stepmothers in Slovak and Romani Fairy Tales.- 7. 'Born in a Tempest when My Mother Died': Shakespeare's Motherless Daughter.- 8. Ophelia's Mother: The Phantom of Maternity in Shakepseare's Hamlet.- 9. Missing Mothers on the Page and Stage: Hamlet and Henry V.- 10. A Side of the Family, Hold the Mother: Dare Wright and Her Fictive Kin in the Lonely Doll Series.- 11. Dead, but not Gone: Mother and Othermother in Holly Black and Ted Naifeh's The Good Neighbours.- 12. Victims and Villains: The Legacy of Mother Blame in Violent-Eye American Literature.- 13. Symbolic Matricide goneAwry: On Absent and - Maybe Even Worse - Present Mothers in Horror Movies.- 14. Television and the Absent Mother: Why Girls and Young Women Struggle to Find the Maternal Role.- 15. Marginalizing Motherhood: Postfeminist Fathers and Dead Mothers in Animated Film.-

Berit Åström is an Associate Professor of English at Umeå University, Sweden. She is the author of 'The Symbolic Annihilation of Mothers in Popular Culture: Single Father and the Death of the Mother', Feminist Media Studies 15.4 (2015) and the editor of Rape in Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy and Beyond (2013).