This book helps to bridge the gap between science and literary scholarship. Building on
findings in the evolutionary human sciences, the authors construct a model of human nature …

Brian Boyd explains why we tell stories and how our minds are shaped to understand them.
After considering art as adaptation, Boyd examines Homer's Odyssey and Dr. Seuss's …

Eighteenth-century fiction is full of mechanical devices and contrivances: Robinson Crusoe
uses his gun and compass to master his island and its inhabitants; Tristram Shandy's …

The present issue of Poetics Today brings together seven different writings that in one way
or another have to do with the interdisciplinary mix of cognitive science, evolutionary …

The new intellectual climate inaugurated by the cognitive revolution can help elicit neglected
contexts for literary historical study, to pose new questions for analysis and reopen old ones …

This book is about the empiricist challenge to literature, and its influence on eighteenth-
century theories of fiction. British empiricism from Bacon to Hume challenged the notion that …

Among Jane Austen's artistic achievements none is more deliberate than her gradual
enlargement of the courtship and marriage plot into a variable pattern for detailing the …

This “fascinating”(Malcolm Gladwell, New York Times bestselling author of Outliers)
examination of literary inventions through the ages, from ancient Mesopotamia to Elena …

Jane Austen is renowned for the economy of her art: for the close focus of her romantic plots
and the precision of her writing style. Exploring that economy stylistically and structurally …

Thirty years ago, the idea of creating a specifically evolutionary theory of literature would
scarcely have seemed imaginable and would certainly not have seemed within the range of …