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The Absent Mother in the Cultural Imagination

Missing, Presumed Dead

  • Book
  • © 2017

Overview

Editors:
  1. Berit Åström

    1. Department of Language Studies, Umeå University , Umeå, Sweden

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  • Provides a broader historical perspective on the trope of the dead or absent mother, spanning material from the 1200s to 2014
  • Cuts across genres and media, providing an interdisciplinary perspective
  • Authors employ a variety of different theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches, including psychoanalysis, cultural studies, feminist and gender studies

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Table of contents (15 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-ix
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  2. Introduction—Explaining and Exploring the Dead or Absent Mother

    • Berit Åström
    Pages 1-21

  3. Theorizing the Absent Mother

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 23-23
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    2. The Lady Vanishes: The Rise of the Spectral Mother

      • Marilyn Francus
      Pages 25-42

  5. Shakespeare’s Absent Mothers Revisited

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 109-109
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    2. ‘Born in a tempest when my mother died’: Shakespeare’s Motherless Daughters

      • Jess Hamlet
      Pages 111-126

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

      • Rebecca Potter, Elizabeth Ann Mackay
      Pages 127-142

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

      • Anna Fraser Mackenzie
      Pages 143-158

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

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 223-223
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    2. Television and the Absent Mother: Why Girls and Young Women Struggle to Find the Maternal Role

      • Rebecca Feasey
      Pages 225-240
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Keywords

About this book

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.

Editors and Affiliations

  • Department of Language Studies, Umeå University , Umeå, Sweden

    Berit Åström

About the editor

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).

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