Jonsson The Early Evolutionary Imagination

Literature and Human Nature
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-3-030-82738-0
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten, eBook

Reihe: Progress in Mathematics

Darwinian evolution is an imaginative problem that has been passed down to us unsolved. It is our most powerful explanation of humanity’s place in nature, but it is also more cognitively demanding and less emotionally satisfying than any myth. From the publication of the 
Origin of Species 
in 1859, evolution has pushed our capacity for storytelling into overdrive, sparking fairy tales, adventure stories, political allegories, utopias, dystopias, social realist novels, and existential meditations. Though this influence on literature has been widely studied, it has not been explained psychologically. This book argues for the adaptive function of storytelling, integrates traditional humanist scholarship with current knowledge about the evolved and adapted human mind, and calls for literary scholars to reframe their interpretation of the first authors who responded to Darwin.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jonsson, Emelie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1.       Chapter 1: Using Evolution to Explain the Evolutionary Imagination.- Chapter 2 Myth-Making in Early Evolutionary Thought.- Chapter 3: Darwinism in Literature.- Chapter 4: From Adventure to Utopia.- Chapter 5: Jack London’s Evolutionary Imagination.- Chapter 6: H. G. Wells’s Evolutionary Imagination.- Chapter 7: Joseph Conrad’s Evolutionary Imagination.- The Unimaginable Place in Nature.

Über Autor(innen)

Emelie Jonsson 
is Assistant Professor of English literature at the Arctic University of Norway, UiT, and Associate Editor of 
Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture
. Her research centers on the friction between human psychology and naturalistic cosmology.