Reasoning Beasts: Evolution, Cognition, and Culture, 1720–1820

by Kathryn Duncan, Michael Austin (Editor)

Evolutionary models of human behavior, long seen as the exclusive property of professional biologists, have recently become big news across the disciplines. The application of evolutionary principles to literary studies has been impressively theorized, but it has yet to be convincingly historicized. Reasoning Beasts seeks to change this by introducing literary scholars to evolutionary psychology and cognitive literary theory through readings of texts, authors, genres, and cultures of the long eighteenth century.
The essays in Reasoning Beasts explore literature as an artifact of human culture that relates in diverse and concrete ways with the evolutionarily adapted human mind. The authors engage a variety of texts through lenses built around questions about the adaptive nature of storytelling and the cognitive processes that allow us to read, and enjoy, literature.

210 pages, Paperback

Published February 16, 2017