Literature and Evolution: A Bio-Cultural Approach

Abstract

Many now feel that the "theory" that has dominated academic literary studies over the last thirty years or so is dead, and that it is time for a return to texts. But many more outside literary studies—in fields as diverse as anthropology, economics, law, psychology, and religion—have recently come to recognize that the deep past that shaped our species can help to explain our present and recent past. Since a bio-cultural model of the human can only be richer than a solely cultural model, and since it implies neither genetic determinism nor limitation to the status quo, I want to argue for a bio-cultural or evolutionary approach to literature, first in very general terms, and then through a few aspects of a single familiar example, Hamlet. Such an approach, I suggest, can offer both a more comprehensive theory of literature and a closer investigation of literary texts.

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