---

Alison Horbury investigates the reprisal of the myth of Persephone - a mother-daughter plot of separation and initiation - in post-feminist television cultures where, she argues, it functions as a symptom expressing a complex around the question of sexual difference - what Lacan calls ´sexuation´, where this question has been otherwise foreclosed.

---

Introduction - Why Persephone?
1. The Myth of Persephone & The Hymn to Demeter
2. Persephone in Heroine Television: The Post-feminist Impasse
3. Persephone as Narrative Symptom: Narrative Transactions in Long-form Viewership
4. Persephone as Epistemological Impasse: The Real Body of Sydney Bristow and ´ ´The Woman Here Depicted ´ ´
5. Persephone as Methodological Impasse: Feminine Jouissance in Veronica ´ ´s ´ ´Two Stories ´ ´
6. Persephone as Historical Impasse: ´ ´Confrontation and Accommodation ´ ´ of the Post-feminist Heroine
Conclusion - The Persephone Complex

---

Professor in Television, Middlesex University, UK

"Learned, scholarly, respectful, Horbury´s work is a return in the real on which the feminine question is waged. The mysteries of Eleusis stand revealed." - Tim Themi, author of Lacan´s Ethics and Nietzsche´s critique of Platonism, (2014)

---

Alison Horbury completed her doctoral degree in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia, where she currently lectures in the fields of Media Studies, Gender Studies, and Communications.

---