The Best Books in Literary Darwinism

by Joseph Carroll
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10 books
In the early nineties of the last century, the evolutionary social sciences started to come together as a massive new intellectual movement. Anthropology and psychology were its home fields, but it reached out to include sociology, political science, cognitive and affective neuroscience, and all the diverse fields of the humanities—from history and philosophy to opera, film, music, video games, pop culture, and literature. While the evolutionary humans sciences were transforming institutional structures in the social sciences at major universities across the world, a small, embattled contingent of scholars from literary study began working on the margins of their own academic establishments, writing theory and criticism that assimilated information from the evolutionary human sciences, and along with that information an ethos centered on the concept of scientific validity. Here are some of the best books to come out of that movement in literary scholarship.
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Evolution, Literature, and Film

A Reader
Brian Boyd, Joseph Carroll, Jonathan Gottschall, 2010
This edited collection gathers up the very best of what was produced by literary Darwinists from the mid-nineties through the first decade of the current century. It is designed as something like an introductory course unto itself. Background readings include hefty selections from Darwin and from contemporary theorists of evolutionary biology, anthropology, and psychology. It has a section devoted to the most important theoretical issue in this field: the adaptive function of the arts. Other sections include seminal statements on evolutionary literary theory, interpretations of individual stories or films, and examples of empirical methods applied to evolutionary literary study.

The Storytelling Animal

How Stories Make Us Human
Jonathan Gottschall, 2012
This is the first monograph I always recommend to people wanting to see what literary Darwinism is all about. Gottschall has a gift for charming readers, reaching out and speaking to them personally. The book is loaded with condensed research, but all that information is presented in a readily accessible, conversational style. The book is also loaded with fascinating anecdotes—stories. Gottschall makes a compelling case that the human mind naturally craves stories.

Literature, Science, and a New Humanities

J. Gottschall, 2008
The first half of this book brilliantly sets out a concise comparison between the intellectual ethos of the academic literary establishment and that of empirical science. The second half offers illustrations of ways in which empirical methods can be brought to bear on literary questions. Gottschall has articulated the empirical ethos more clearly than any other evolutionary literary theorist.

On the Origin of Stories

Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction
Brian Boyd, 2009
Boyd combines research on human evolution with cognitive psychology. He offers crisp and lucid summaries of the relevant research. His sinewy style combines the best of popular science writing with a fine literary sensibility. His marshaling of ideas from evolutionary and cognitive psychology presents itself as a distinct alternative to the poststructuralist critical theories that dominate the academic literary establishment.

Reading Human Nature

Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice
Joseph Carroll, 2011
I started building a model of human nature and a model of evolutionary literary theory in two earlier books, Evolution and Literary Theory (1995) and Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (2004). Reading Human Nature refines and develops the theory and offers three extended examples of evolutionary literary criticism, in Hamlet, Wuthering Heights, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. The model of human nature in the first essay, a big theoretical essay, is among the most complete and adequate descriptions available in my writing, including the writing that follows Reading Human Nature.

Why Horror Seduces

Mathias F. Clasen, 2017
You don’t have to love horror to love this book. Like Gottschall, Clasen has a knack for engaging, personable writing, with witty turns that will make you laugh, even while the hair is standing up on the back of your neck at the horror scenarios he relishes evoking. Clasen is absolutely convincing about the ways in which horror taps into our inherited ancestral fears and disgusts. A glance at the blurbs quoted on the Amazon page for this book will give you a foretaste of Clasen’s power to charm and persuade.

American Classics

Evolutionary Perspectives
Judith P. Saunders, 2018
Saunders is an unusually acute and subtle literary critic. She is deeply immersed in the great works of American literature, and she brings those works vividly to life. She penetrates deeply into the evolved motives that regulate even the most seemingly idiosyncratic literary works. She demonstrates that literature is profoundly shaped by our evolved human motives and emotions. She also demonstrates that strong explanatory reduction can be paired with finely nuanced literary criticism.

The Early Evolutionary Imagination

Literature and Human Nature
Emelie Jonsson, 2021
Jonsson argues that humans are suspended between a need to see reality and an urge to mythologize. Darwin’s theory is impersonal and mechanical, but authors in the later 19th and early 20th centuries still found ways to turn evolution into morally charged dramas. Jonsson convincingly demonstrates that those same myth-making impulses shape our imaginative experience today. The literary criticism in this book is superb, and Jonsson’s own rhetoric has classic power. She gives illuminating and entertaining critiques of works by Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Jack London, H. G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad.

Evolutionary Perspectives on Imaginative Culture

Joseph Carroll, Mathias Clasen, Emelie Jonsson, 2020
This volume comes close to representing the best work being currently done in evolutionary studies in the arts. Individual chapters take up the neurobiology of imagination, aesthetics, the plastic arts, music, film, video games, and literature. The anthology from 2010, Evolution, Literature, and Film, sets literary and cinematic study within the contexts of evolutionary biology and the evolutionary humans sciences. This more recent anthology places evolutionary literary study in the context of other fields in the humanities.

Consilience

The Unity of Knowledge
Edward O. Wilson, 1999
Wilson devotes only one chapter to literature and the other arts, but his vision of a unified natural order accessible to scientific inquiry became a rallying point for evolutionary scholars in the humanities. Whether they practice empirical methods or not, evolutionary literary scholars believe that no essential barrier separates knowledge in the sciences from knowledge in the humanities. Like Wilson, they believe that knowledge in all current fields, from the hardest of the hard sciences to the softest of the humanities, form one unbroken chain of causal explanation. And like Wilson, they believe that evolutionary biology is the central pivot linking the sciences and humanities.