Abstract
Whilst the brain is the source of the electrical activity that sparks each unique identity, the heart is considered the pumping emotional centre of the individual. The reduction of the heart to a symbol turns it into a body part that is capable of being externally transferred. Such a Gothic extraction is discussed in relation to the film My Bloody Valentine (1981). The uncanny beat of a dead man’s heart is addressed in Edgar Allan Poe’s 1843 short ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and its 1941 film adaptation. The mad science of heart transplant fiction is explored in the films The Walking Dead (1936), Doctor Blood’s Coffin (1961), Night of the Bloody Apes (1969), Dr. Giggles (1992) and Awake (2007), and Judy Budnitz’s 1998 short story ‘Guilt’.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Bibliography
Bardine, Bryan (2009), ‘Elements of the Gothic in Heavy Metal: A Match Made in Hell’, in Gerd Bayer (ed.), Heavy Metal Music in Britain, Farnham: Ashgate.
Baum, L. Frank (1900), The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Chicago, IL: George M. Hill Company.
Budnitz, Judy (2000 [1998]), ‘Guilt’, in Flying Leap, London: Flamingo.
Bunzel, B., Schmidl-Mohl, B., Grundböck, A. and Wollenek, G. (1992), ‘Does Changing the Heart Mean Changing Personality? A Retrospective Inquiry on 47 Heart Transplant Patients’, Quality of Life Research, 1: 4, pp. 251–256.
Cooper, D.K., Miller, L.W. and Patterson, G.A. (1996), The Transplantation and Replacement of Thoracic Organs: The Present Status of Biological and Mechanical Replacement of the Heart and Lungs, second edition, Hingham, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Dunning, A.J. (1992), Extremes: Reflections on Human Behaviour, trans. Johan Theron, Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Francis, Gavin (2015), Adventures in Human Being, London: Profile Books.
Greene, Doyle (2005), Mexploitation Cinema: A Critical History of Mexican Vampire, Wrestler, Ape-Man and Similar Films, 1957–1977, Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
James, M.R. (1994 [1904]), ‘Lost Hearts’, in Ghost Stories, London: Penguin.
King, Stephen (2016 [1986]), IT, New York: Scribner.
Poe, Edgar Allan (1994 [1843]), ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, in Selected Tales, London: Penguin.
Roach, Mary (2004), Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers, London: Penguin.
Robinson, E.A. (1965), ‘Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 19: 4, pp. 369–378.
Shen, Dan (2008), ‘Edgar Allan Poe’s Aesthetic Theory, the Insanity Debate, and the Ethically Oriented Dynamics of “The Tell-Tale Heart”’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 63: 3, pp. 321–345.
Stevens, Scott Manning (1997), ‘Sacred Heart and Secular Brain’, in David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (eds), The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, London: Routledge.
Stoker, Bram (2000 [1897]), Dracula, Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Conrich, I., Sedgwick, L. (2017). The Heart. In: Gothic Dissections in Film and Literature. Palgrave Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-30358-5_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-30358-5_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-30357-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-30358-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)