Suchergebnisse

AbstractIan Duncan's Human Forms and Devin Griffiths's Age of Analogy attempt to illuminate inter­actions between evolutionary theories and literature from the late eighteenth century up through the nineteenth century. They do not advance knowledge about this subject. Both authors treat evolution as a semi-fictional construction that owes more to literary inspiration than to the scientific method, and they reduce literature to a battleground for ideological forces. They write using dense terminology, shifting rhetoric, and flights of verbal performance that obscure their claims. In all these respects, they are representative of the field "science and literature"-and particularly of the subfield that studies evolution and literature. I analyze the history of this subfield of literary scholarship and attempt to explain how it developed into its present form. The subfield was founded in the 1980s on the basis of poststructuralist theory and has never escaped the core assumptions of that theory: our minds cannot reach outside culture; our thoughts, behaviors, and ideas about the world are primarily the result of our culture; some cultural traditions are oppressive while others are liberating; and the meaning of texts cannot be determined. Though Duncan and Griffiths represent the highest level of schol­arship on evolution and literature, I argue that they fail their fascinating subject by offering very little that is new within their own field, and nothing that is of value to other fields.

-

Abstract
This article applies a life history model to advance the evolutionary understanding of poetry that inspired nineteenth-century Swedish National Romanticism. We show that the characters featured in two of Erik Gustaf Geijer's poems, "The Viking" and "The Yeoman Farmer" (1811), display patterns of time perspective, mating effort, and parental invest­ment that are now recognized as central life history attributes: a fast strategy and a slow strategy, respectively. These patterns were identified by undergraduate participants (N = 427) who read excerpts of the poems that had been stripped of identifying information and mentions of romantic or sexual relationships. Participants read each poem and rated each character on validated scales of the life history dimensions of mating effort and paren­tal investment, relationship interests and attractiveness, characteristics of his developmen­tal environment, and physiological characteristics. Results are consistent with generally accepted associations in life history theory and also inform current theoretical develop­ments and debates. Geijer had an intuitive understanding of life history patterns, which he used to create recognizable characters for his Romantic depiction of Swedish history.

Part I: The Evolution of Imagination -- The Behaviorally Modern Human Imagination -- The Evolution of Imagination through Narratives and Belief -- Part II: Meta-Narratives -- Imagining the Gods -- The Evolution of Traits and Stories: Two Rival Templates for Self-Understanding -- Descent with Imagination: The Cultural Evolution of Traditional Narratives -- The Unimaginable Place in Nature: Literary Resistance to Darwinian Evolution -- Epic Communities and Cosmic Apprenticeship: Group-Belonging and Social Learning in Popular Science Books -- Part III: Aesthetics, Music, and the Plastic Arts -- Tapping the Imagination at the Dawn of Human Culture: Art, Brain and Evolutionary Pressures -- Evolutionary Constraints on Creativity in the Visual and Plastic Arts -- The Role of Aesthetic Style in Framing Cognitive Orientation Towards the Future -- The Evolution of Music: A Paradigm of Embodied Cognition -- The Influence of Image Salience on Artistic Expression: Cross-Cultural Examples of Large Felid Predators -- Key Stimuli and Power Objects: Aesthetics and Humans' Inborn Sensibilities -- Part IV: Film, Media, and Performance -- Film and Coevolution: Kubrick's Movies as Modes of Religious Ritual -- Why Women Love Bromance: The Rise of Slash Fiction -- "Unbreakable, Incorruptible, Unyielding": Doom as an Agency Simulator -- Part V: Literature -- Adaptive Flights of Fancy: An Evolutionary Perspective on Speculative Fiction -- Narrative and Verse—and Comics -- Literary Representations of Parental Investment: Emotional Quandaries and Strategic Decisions.