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Evolutionary Literary Theory

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Joseph Carroll at University of Missouri–St. Louis
Joseph Carroll
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Abstract

This chapter identifies the historical provenance and main contentions in evolutionary literary theory, discusses the institutional position of evolutionary literary scholars, identifies key concepts in the evolutionary social sciences, explains their usefulness for literary study, and explains how they offer alternatives to current major forms of literary theory. After describing the controversy over the adaptive function of the arts, the author proposes a synthesis of multiple hypotheses, delineates the scope of evolutionary literary criticism, and describes one large‐scale study that integrates methods from the social sciences and literary criticism. The conclusion offers reflections on the future of evolutionary literary study.
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... Cognitive psychologist Keith Oatley (2008) calls fiction "the mind's flight simulator"-a happy turn of phrase that captures the thrust of the adaptation argument (for a nuanced breakdown of adaptation arguments, see Carroll 2018). The significant research centering on the adaptive aspects of literature (Dutton 2009;Carroll 2011;Gottschall 2013) is grist for my mill. ...
... Cognitive psychologist Keith Oatley (2008) calls fiction "the mind's flight simulator"-a happy turn of phrase that captures the thrust of the adaptation argument (for a nuanced breakdown of adaptation arguments, see Carroll 2018). The significant research centering on the adaptive aspects of literature (Dutton 2009;Carroll 2011;Gottschall 2013) is grist for my mill. Work in literary Darwinism and the psychology of literature and film confirms the adaptive aspects of an imaginative system-a system that is deeper and more fundamental than literature. ...
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  • Dec 2021
A mythopoetic paradigm or perspective sees the world primarily as a dramatic story of competing personal intentions, rather than a system of objective impersonal laws. Asma (2017) argued that our contemporary imaginative cognition is evolutionarily conserved-it has structural and functional similarities to premodern Homo sapiens’s cognition. This article will (i) outline the essential features of mythopoetic cognition or adaptive imagination, (ii) delineate the adaptive sociocultural advantages of mythopoetic cognition, (iii) explain the phylogenetic and ontogenetic mechanisms that give rise to human mythopoetic mind (i.e., genetically endowed simulation and associational systems that underwrite diverse symbolic systems), (iv) show how mythopoetic cognition challeng­es contemporary trends in cognitive science and philosophy, and (v) recognize and outline empirical approaches for a new cognitive science of the imagination.
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... Since the mid-1990s, researchers in the field of evolutionary literary studies have been working towards an increasingly granular understanding of how the modern literary industry trades on ancient appetites and aptitudes of ours for stories and storytelling. The evolutionary, or "biocultural," approach to literature is founded upon the idea that our basic capacities and predispositions have evolved in an adaptive relationship with our environment through the process of natural selection (Carroll, 2018). ...
How Stephen King Writes and Why: Language, Immersion, Emotion
Article
Full-text available
  • Jul 2023
Many successful novelists offer writing advice, but do they actually follow it themselves? And if so, can it truly account for the success of their novels? We dissect and examine three pieces of writing advice from Stephen King's book On Writing (2000). King counsels writers to (1) write in a simple language to aid readers' narrative immersion; (2) avoid -ly adverbs, especially in dialogue attribution; and (3) avoid the passive voice. We examine these three pieces of advice both theoretically, reviewing them in light of what we know about how literature affects readers from such fields as literary linguistics and evolutionary literary studies, and empirically, using a computational linguistics approach to test whether King follows his own advice and whether it can explain his success as a novelist. We find that King's advice about simple language makes sense if an author's goal is to sell books while his advice against -ly adverbs makes sense if the goal is instead literary recognition. For his advice against using the passive voice, we find no substantial theoretical or empirical basis.
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... I hope to have demonstrated here that an evolutionary perspective can put into focus the value of King's oeuvre. Even though evolutionary literary study has shown its explanatory and interpretive value (Carroll, 2018), King has largely escaped the attention of evolutionary critics. Indeed, "despite being one of the most widely read authors of all time, King is woefully understudied" (Cowan, 2018). ...
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Chapter
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  • Aug 2020
The bestselling author Stephen King is famous for his scary stories. He has terrified and delighted millions of readers with his horror fiction, but he continues to face indifference or even hostility from parts of the critical establishment, predominantly because of the stigma associated with the horror genre. However, I argue from the perspective of evolutionary literary theory that the horror genre fulfills an important psychological function as threat simulation. King is temperamentally drawn to dark subject matter, and he uses this subject matter to investigate the complexities of human nature and the social world. Through interpretive analysis of two of King’s most famous novels, Pet Sematary (1983) and It (1986), I argue that King uses the elements of horror not just to provide threat simulations for his readers, but also to give readers psychological, social, and moral insight through imaginative simulation.
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The Universality of Emotion: Perspectives from the Sciences and Humanities
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Not supplied by the author. This Element surveys how a number of major disciplines − psychology, neuroscience, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, history, linguistics, and literary/cultural studies − have addressed the long-standing research question of whether human emotions should be thought of as meaningfully 'universal.' The Element presents both the universalist and anti-universalist positions, and concludes by considering attempts to move beyond this increasingly unhelpful binary.
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  • Oct 2022
COMPELLING STORIES provides a comprehensive introduction to children’s and young adult literature in English language education. It demonstrates why story matters for language learners and presents many ideas for teaching with literary texts from diverse cultural contexts, stories that are well suited to the primary or secondary classroom. The book explores the advantages of deep reading and the vital importance of in-depth learning, motivating students to work collaboratively and with empathy while preparing for and confronting the challenges of the twenty-first century. Story is promoted as central to language education in order to experience new perspectives from around the world. The focus is on: GRAPHIC NOVELS, PICTUREBOOKS, YOUNG ADULT FICTION, VERSE NOVELS, DYNAMIC PLAYS, SONGS, POETRY and CREATIVE WRITING. Illustrating the approach with a Deep Reading Framework based in research and theory, Janice Bland guides the reader to discover how to make use of literary texts in a way that energizes students for interculturality, creativity and critical literacy.
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Bridging the Narrative Abyss: Evolution Toward Social Democracy in a Millennium of Nordic Fiction
Thesis
Full-text available
  • May 2022
As the past decade built toward today’s crisis, Scandinavian social democracy was frequently suggested as a model that could reform capitalism. The Nordic region’s income equality, gender equality, low-conflict politics, and prosperous economies with generous benefits contribute to high levels of happiness and social cohesion. Leading politicians on the American Left, as well as a majority of young Americans, express that they would prefer such outcomes. But is the Nordic Model suitable for cross-cultural export? This study examines the cultural origins of Scandinavian egalitarianism by applying an evolutionary perspective to ten influential works of fiction. These criticisms—ranging from an Icelandic saga to Swedish posthumanist TV—align to trace the emergence of modernity in the Nordic region. These works illustrate how fiction can be an evolutionary tool when environmental change requires that communities update the story they live by, their master-narrative. This study analyzes the ideological evolution from the polytheistic beliefs of Viking kinship societies, to Christian monotheism, to religious and later secular humanism, the master-narrative of the modern world. With each of these transitions, communities face a narrative abyss. The unquestionable story that had provided meaning, informed their cooperation, and dictated which future to strive for becomes transparent to them. Homo sapiens need such stories, or their larger communities come unglued. Reading these Nordic case studies through an evolutionary lens illuminates the brain mechanisms that make us factionalize, fall prey to anxiety, double down on orthodoxy, or even kill our neighbors during these master-narrative transitions. This study proposes that the West entered into such a transition in the 2010s. No longer convinced by liberal humanism, some populations have reverted to older stories of nationalism or tribal belonging. Until people are able to unite around a new master-narrative, things could get worse. The tenth work of fiction points to the leading candidate for becoming tomorrow’s uniting story: dataism. This study concludes that social democracy arose from uniquely Nordic experiences, which makes the political model unlikely to work well elsewhere. But insights from this journey through a millennium of cultural change illuminate the challenges humanity faces in the twenty-first century.
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