The Absent Mother in the Cultural Imagination; Acknowledgments; Contents; Introduction-Explaining and Exploring the Dead or Absent Mother; Absent Mothers in Online Media; Mothers in Scholarly Research
Present and Absent; The Author's Mother
Revenge, Fear and Longing; Psychoanalysis
Maternal Power, Individuation and Matricide; Historic Specificity and Socio-Cultural Influences; Mother's Death as Narrative Device; Analyzing the Dead/Absent Mother-Trope; Notes; Works Cited; Part I Theorizing the Absent Mother; The Lady Vanishes: The Rise of the Spectral Mother; Notes; Works Cited

Part II The Absent Mother as Protector and Advisor Saintly Protection: The Postmortem 'Mothers' of Medieval Hagiography; Notes; Works Cited; 'Be War Be My Wo': Gaynour and Her Mother in The Awntyrs off Arthure; Notes; Works Cited; Dead Mothers and Absent Stepmothers in Slovak and Romani Fairy Tales; Slovak and Romani Folk Tales; Children's Stories; Mothers' Stories; Conclusion; Note; Works Cited; 'A dumme thynge': The Posthumous Voice as Rhetoric in the Mothers' Legacies of Dorothy Leigh and Elizabeth Joscelin; Notes; Works Cited; Part III Shakespeare's Absent Mothers Revisited

'Born in a tempest when my mother died': Shakespeare's Motherless DaughtersBeatrice; Marina; Perdita; Notes; Works Cited; Ophelia's Mother: The Phantom of Maternity in Shakespeare's Hamlet; Notes; Works Cited; Missing Mothers on the Page and Stage: Hamlet and Henry V; Gender and Genre: Mothers in Criticism; Deconstructing Absence and Silence; Missing Mothers in the Shakespearean Context; Wives and/or Mothers?; Directing Henry V: Absence and Implications; Editing Hamlet; Note; Works Cited; Part IV The Absent Mother as Expendable, or a Threat

A Side of Family, Hold the Mother: Dare Wright and Her Fictive Kin in the Lonely Doll SeriesWorks Cited; Dead, But Not Gone: Mother and Othermother in Holly Black and Ted Naifeh's The Good Neighbors; Situating the Missing Mother as Narrative Script; The Good Neighbors: The Missing Fairy Mother; Mother Myths, Mother Bodies; Gender Fiction and Maternal Self-Sacrifice; Notes; Works Cited; Victims and Villains: The Legacy of Mother Blame in Violent-Eye American Literature; Works Cited; Symbolic Matricide Gone Awry: On Absent and-Maybe Even Worse-Present Mothers in Horror Movies

A Mother's LoveNorman's Frustration; Billy's Rage; Carrie's Drama; Ryan's Gender Trouble; A Mother's Dilemma; Notes; Works Cited; Part V Absent Mothers on the Big and Small Screen in the New Millennium; Television and the Absent Mother: Why Girls and Young Women Struggle to Find the Maternal Role; Single Fathers and the Entertainment Arena; Looking for Mother; Conclusion; Notes; Works Cited; Marginalizing Motherhood: Postfeminist Fathers and Dead Mothers in Animated Film; Twentieth-Century Animated Films
Fathers and Daughters; Changing Definitions of Fatherhood

Twenty-First Century Films
Fathers and Sons