The Absent Mother in the Cultural Imagination : Missing, Presumed Dead

Description

This anthology explores the recurring trope of the dead or absent mother in Western cultural productions. Across historical periods and genres, this dialogue has been employed to articulate and debate questions of politics and religion, social and cultural change as well as issues of power and authority within the family. Åström seeks to investigate the many functions and meanings of the dialogue by covering extensive material from the 1200s to 2014 including hagiography, romances, folktales, plays, novels, children’s literature and graphic novels, as well as film and television. This is achieved by looking at the discourse both as products of the time and culture that produced the various narratives, and as part of an on-going cultural conversation that spans the centuries, resulting in an innovative text that will be of great interest to all scholars of gender, feminist and media studies. Front Matter ....Pages i-ix Introduction—Explaining and Exploring the Dead or Absent Mother (Berit Åström)....Pages 1-21 Front Matter ....Pages 23-23 The Lady Vanishes: The Rise of the Spectral Mother (Marilyn Francus)....Pages 25-42 Front Matter ....Pages 43-43 Saintly Protection: The Postmortem ‘Mothers’ of Medieval Hagiography (Mary Beth Long)....Pages 45-58 ‘Be War Be My Wo’: Gaynour and Her Mother in The Awntyrs off Arthure (Amanda Bohne)....Pages 59-72 Dead Mothers and Absent Stepmothers in Slovak and Romani Fairy Tales (Katarina Labudova)....Pages 73-89 ‘A dumme thynge’: The Posthumous Voice as Rhetoric in the Mothers’ Legacies of Dorothy Leigh and Elizabeth Joscelin (Ailsa Grant Ferguson)....Pages 91-108 Front Matter ....Pages 109-109 ‘Born in a tempest when my mother died’: Shakespeare’s Motherless Daughters (Jess Hamlet)....Pages 111-126 Ophelia’s Mother: The Phantom of Maternity in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Rebecca Potter, Elizabeth Ann Mackay)....Pages 127-142 Missing Mothers on the Page and Stage: Hamlet and Henry V (Anna Fraser Mackenzie)....Pages 143-158 Front Matter ....Pages 159-159 A Side of Family, Hold the Mother: Dare Wright and Her Fictive Kin in the Lonely Doll Series (Heather Brown-Hudson)....Pages 161-174 Dead, But Not Gone: Mother and Othermother in Holly Black and Ted Naifeh’s The Good Neighbors (Kirsten Møllegaard)....Pages 175-190 Victims and Villains: The Legacy of Mother Blame in Violent-Eye American Literature (Joanna Wilson-Scott)....Pages 191-205 Symbolic Matricide Gone Awry: On Absent and—Maybe Even Worse—Present Mothers in Horror Movies (Eike Träger)....Pages 207-222 Front Matter ....Pages 223-223 Television and the Absent Mother: Why Girls and Young Women Struggle to Find the Maternal Role (Rebecca Feasey)....Pages 225-240 Marginalizing Motherhood: Postfeminist Fathers and Dead Mothers in Animated Film (Berit Åström)....Pages 241-258 Back Matter ....Pages 259-264