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

9783030827380 (electronic bk.)
3030827380 (electronic bk.)
3030827372
9783030827373

Cham : Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.

©2021

English

1 online resource (xii, 300 pages)

10.1007/978-3-030-82738-0 doi

PR878.E95 J66 2021eb

809.9336

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.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

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Description based on print version record.
Online resource; title from PDF title page (SpringerLink, viewed October 12, 2021).

Cognitive studies in literature and performance.

Print version: 9783030827373
EARLY EVOLUTIONARY IMAGINATION.

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