The Absent Mother in the Cultural Imagination

Chapter 1 Introduction—Explaining and Exploring the Dead or Absent Mother

Chapter 2 The Lady Vanishes: The Rise of the Spectral Mother

Chapter 3 Saintly Protection: The Postmortem ‘Mothers’ of Medieval Hagiography

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

Chapter 5 Dead Mothers and Absent Stepmothers in Slovak and Romani Fairy Tales

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

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

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

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

Chapter 10 A Side of Family, Hold the Mother: Dare Wright and Her Fictive Kin in the Lonely Doll Series

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

Chapter 12 Victims and Villains: The Legacy of Mother Blame in Violent-Eye American Literature

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

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

Chapter 15 Marginalizing Motherhood: Postfeminist Fathers and Dead Mothers in Animated Film