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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.
List of contents
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.-
About the author
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).
Summary
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.
