Books by Author Joseph Carroll

by Joseph Carroll
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7 books
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The Cultural Theory of Matthew Arnold

Joseph Carroll, 1982
I go over the whole span of Arnold’s writing, with a first chapter on his poetry and then the later chapters on his prose work. I argue that as a solution for the problems of existential disorientation explored in his poetry Arnold developed a unified system of cultural theory. Like other major eighteenth and nineteenth-century cultural theorists, he tried to assimilate all of world history to a teleological vision of human development leading to a millennial resolution of all human conflict. For Arnold, that millennial resolution involves a harmonious development of all the human faculties engaged in harmonious social relations with all other such perfectly developed specimens nurtured by the best that has been thought and said. Arnold can give a good deal of colorful substance to these abstract concepts because his own temperament is humane and generous and his own taste cultivated and refined. His theory is antiquated, but he is excellent company, and his companionship is a tutelage in literary good sense and good humor.

Wallace Stevens' Supreme Fiction

A New Romanticism
Joseph Carroll, 1987
Stevens envisioned his poetic career as a quest. He aimed to create a poem that would be “equivalent to the idea of god,” and that would in fact replace God. In this respect, Stevens’s poetic project was a direct continuation of Victorian efforts to make poetry serve as a substitute for religion. Stevens’s solution to the Victorian collapse of religious faith is to envision the world itself as a poetic process that culminates in an epiphanic self-recognition. The supreme fiction is a transcendent spiritual force that comes to recognize itself in the fictive images of it made by poets.

Evolution and Literary Theory

Joseph Carroll, 1995
I wrote this book in a spirit divided between cold hatred for the follies of irrationalist literary theory and warm enthusiasm for the explanatory scope of evolutionary biology and the evolutionary human sciences. Half the book is a satirical critique of prevailing modes in literary theory, and the other half an effort to construct a biologically grounded system for analyzing meaning in literature. The third half of the book is my effort to cram everything I then knew about literature and cultural history into a single book. All three halves of the book have merit in their own rights, but three is too many halves. Two might even have stretched the point. In any case, my later works are more disciplined and focused. Still, Evolution and Literary Theory will in all likelihood, however regrettably and imperfectly, remain my one really big book.

Literary Darwinism

Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature
Joseph Carroll, 2004
Darwin’s vision of deep time absorbs all things human. If one starts from that vision of a vast evolutionary process extending over billions of years, how does one then make causal explanatory linkages that lead through human history and culture to the finest points of meaning in imaginative verbal artifacts? That is more or less the challenge I presented to myself with Evolution and Literary Theory. Over the next ten years or so, as I wrote book reviews, theoretical essays, and essays in literary criticism, that challenge was always in the back of my mind. The essays collected in Literary Darwinism constitute ways of responding to that challenge. One good friend read a draft of the introduction and felt that I was being too brash, aggressive, and assertive. Many less friendly readers have felt the same way since. The book helped establish evolutionary literary study as a self-conscious program with an ambitious purpose: to reshape the way literary studies are done, placing them firmly within the explanatory matrix of evolutionary biology.

Reading Human Nature

Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice
Joseph Carroll, 2011
This book provides a more complete understanding of human nature than the evolutionary human sciences had hitherto provided. I argue that the imagination has crucial adaptive functions that have had a decisive role in developing our uniquely, specifically human nature. The book includes theoretical essays, commentaries on cultural history, examples of empirical (quantitative) literary analysis, and essays in Darwinian literary criticism: close readings of Hamlet, Wuthering Heights, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. The practical literary criticism in this volume is more advanced, as specifically evolutionary ways of doing literary criticism, than the literary criticism in my earlier volumes.

Graphing Jane Austen

The Evolutionary Basis of Literary Meaning
J. Carroll, J. Gottschall, John A. Johnson, Daniel J. Kruger, 2012
Graphing Jane Austen was designed to fulfill several ambitions: to build a model of human nature—a comprehensive, biologically grounded set of basic motives and emotions—that included a dimension for differences in individual identity; to correlate the features in that model with characteristics of fictional stories and with the responses of readers to those stories; and to conduct experimental trials that would use the methods of the social sciences to assess validity in findings. We put together a model with basic motives, basic emotions, the five factors of personality, sex, and “agonistic” status, that is whether characters were protagonists, antagonists, or minor characters. We needed some definite body of literary works to reference. We chose nineteenth-century British novels—widely familiar in reprints and perennial favorites with literary readers. A team of four—two literary scholars (Jon Gottschall and I) and two psychologists (John Johnson and Dan Kruger)—built a website and posted names of about 2,000 characters from some 200 novels and asked readers to pick a character and fill out a questionnaire about the character’s motives, mating criteria, personality, and agonistic status. Respondents were also asked to answer questions about their own emotional and evaluative responses to a character. We analyzed the results from several hundred responses and concluded that agonistic structure in Victorian novels replicated the egalitarian ethos of hunter-gatherer culture, stigmatizing dominance behavior (the distinguishing feature of antagonists) in order to create a virtual community of cooperating equals.

Evolutionary Perspectives on Imaginative Culture

Joseph Carroll, Mathias Clasen, Emelie Jonsson, 2020
Among the essays I’ve written since Reading Human Nature was published in 2011, the most important is one of the most recent, the essay on the neurological basis of the imagination that is the first chapter in Evolutionary Perspectives on Imaginative Culture. As a discussion of imagination itself, both this essay and the next in the volume, by Valerie van Mulukom, form a prelude to the subsequent essays on more particular aspects of the humanities: music, the plastic arts, aesthetics, film, video games, and literature.