Evolution and Literary Theory (Volume 1) - Hardcover

Carroll, Joseph

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0826209793 ISBN 13: 9780826209795

Publisher: University of Missouri, 1994

Synopsis

Carroll anatomizes the irrationalism of current literary theory with surgical precision. In a concise, lucid prose, he lays bare the sophistries at the heart of the doctrines propounded by Derrida, Foucault, Jameson, Greenblatt, Eagleton, J. Hillis Miller, Fish, and many others. In opposition to the textualism and indeterminacy that constitute the central doctrines of poststructuralism, Carroll affiliates himself with a realist and naturalist tradition of thought that runs from Darwin and Huxley, through Leslie Stephen and Thorstein Veblen, to Konrad Lorenz and Karl Popper. He offers a comprehensive synthesis of current evolutionary theory in the human sciences, and he shows why the evolutionary paradigm provides the only adequate source for a modern theory of culture.

About this title

About the Author:

Joseph Carroll is the author of The Cultural Theory of Matthew Arnold (1981), Wallace Stevens' Supreme Fiction (1987), Literary Darwinism (2004), and Reading Human Nature (2011). He is a co-author of Graphing Jane Austen: The Evolutionary Basis of Literary Meaning (2012) and a co-editor of Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader (2010). His edition of Darwin's Origin of Species was published by Broadview in 2003. He is Curators' Professor of English at the University of Missouri, St. Louis.

Review:

"Carroll provides a systematic, thorough, and brilliant polemic with the 'literary theoreticians,' and gives us a book that evolutionary psychologists would do well to use as a primer on the topic." Gary Cox, Human Ethology Newsletter

"This is an extremely significant book. The term path-breaking, usually applied to works that better merit the term carpet-sweeping, is for once entirely deserved." John Constable, Studies in English Literature

"Evolution and Literary Theory is a brilliantly sustained argument for the complete abandonment of the poststructuralist paradigm in favor of a neo-Darwinian one." Robert Storey, Mimesis and the Human Animal

"lucid, elegant writing. . . . Carroll writes clearly, authoritatively, without jargon, and with frequent, delicious wit. His values, explanations, evidence, and criticisms are concisely and plainly stated." Ellen Dissanayake, Philosophy and Literature

"Carroll's book is the first major work in over a century (since Taine, 1879) to situate the creation and interpretation of literature within the sphere of human biology." Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, Skeptic

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0826209793
• ISBN 13: 9780826209795
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 536