The Absent Mother in the Cultural Imagination

1. Introduction—Explaining and Exploring the Dead or Absent Mother
Berit Åström

Part I. Theorizing the Absent Mother

2. The Lady Vanishes: The Rise of the Spectral Mother
Marilyn Francus

Part II. The Absent Mother as Protector and Advisor

3. Saintly Protection: The Postmortem ‘Mothers’ of Medieval Hagiography
Mary Beth Long

4. ‘Be War Be My Wo’: Gaynour and Her Mother in The Awntyrs off Arthure

Amanda Bohne

5. Dead Mothers and Absent Stepmothers in Slovak and Romani Fairy Tales
Katarina Labudova

6. ‘A dumme thynge’: The Posthumous Voice as Rhetoric in the Mothers’ Legacies of Dorothy Leigh and Elizabeth Joscelin
Ailsa Grant Ferguson

Part III. Shakespeare’s Absent Mothers Revisited

7. ‘Born in a tempest when my mother died’: Shakespeare’s Motherless Daughters
Jess Hamlet

8. Ophelia’s Mother: The Phantom of Maternity in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Rebecca Potter, Elizabeth Ann Mackay

9. Missing Mothers on the Page and Stage: Hamlet and Henry V

Anna Fraser Mackenzie

Part IV. The Absent Mother as Expendable, or a Threat

10. A Side of Family, Hold the Mother: Dare Wright and Her Fictive Kin in the Lonely Doll Series
Heather Brown-Hudson

11. Dead, But Not Gone: Mother and Othermother in Holly Black and Ted Naifeh’s The Good Neighbors

Kirsten Møllegaard

12. Victims and Villains: The Legacy of Mother Blame in Violent-Eye American Literature
Joanna Wilson-Scott

13. Symbolic Matricide Gone Awry: On Absent and—Maybe Even Worse—Present Mothers in Horror Movies
Eike Träger

Part V. Absent Mothers on the Big and Small Screen in the New Millennium

14. Television and the Absent Mother: Why Girls and Young Women Struggle to Find the Maternal Role
Rebecca Feasey

15. Marginalizing Motherhood: Postfeminist Fathers and Dead Mothers in Animated Film
Berit Åström

Keywords: Cultural and Media Studies, Cultural Theory, Cultural History, Family, Film History, Children's Literature, Early Modern/Renaissance Literature