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).

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

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.-