From the Back Cover:
As the founder and leading practitioner of "literary Darwinism," Joseph Carroll remains at the forefront of a major movement in literary studies. Signaling key new developments in this approach, Reading Human Nature contains trenchant theoretical essays, innovative empirical research, sweeping surveys of intellectual history, and sophisticated interpretations of specific literary works, including The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wuthering Heights, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Hamlet. Carroll makes a compelling case that literary Darwinism is not just another "school" or movement in literary theory. It is the moving force in a fundamental paradigm change in the humanities--a revolution. Evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists have provided massive evidence that motives and emotions are rooted in biology, but they have given far too little attention to the products of the imagination. By integrating evolutionary social science with literary humanism, Carroll offers a more complete and adequate understanding of human nature.
About the Author:
Joseph Carroll is the author of The Cultural Theory of Matthew Arnold (1981), Wallace Stevens' Supreme Fiction (1987), Evolution and Literary Theory (1995), and Literary Darwinism (2004). He is a co-author of Graphing Jane Austen: The Evolutionary Basis of Literary Meaning (2012) and a co-editor of Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader (2010). His edition of Darwin's Origin of Species was published by Broadview in 2003. He is Curators' Professor of English at the University of Missouri, St. Louis.
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