Early evolutionary imagination

Early evolutionary imagination: literature and human nature

by Jonsson, Emelie

Type Book
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Darwinian evolution is an imaginative problem that has been passed down to us unsolved. It is our most powerful explanation of humanitys 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.…

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Title Statements

  • Full title :Early evolutionary imagination : literature and human nature / Emelie Jonsson.

Summary

Darwinian evolution is an imaginative problem that has been passed down to us unsolved. It is our most powerful explanation of humanitys 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. 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.

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Edition Statements

  • Publication Date:©2021

Publication Statements

  • Publisher(s):Palgrave Macmillan
  • Place of Publication:Cham
  • Language:eng
  • Publication Date:©2021

The Physical Object

  • Description:1 online resource (xii, 300 pages)

Edition Identifiers

  • ISBN:9783030827380, 3030827380
  • DOI:10.1007/978-3-030-82738-0
  • oclc:on1272856858
  • LC Classification:PR878.E95
  • Dewey Decimal:809.9336

Subjects

Criticism, interpretation, etc Electronic books Évolution dans la littérature Evolution in literature Literature, Modern Literature, Modern -- History and criti… Littérature -- Histoire et critique. --…

Writers

Jonsson, Emelie

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