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Full Description
The contributors to this volume share the assumption that popular narrative, when viewed with an evolutionary lens, offers an incisive index into human nature. In theory, narrative art could take a near infinity of possible forms. In actual practice, however, particular motifs, plot patterns, stereotypical figures, and artistic devices persistently resurface, indicating specific predilections frequently at odds with our actual living conditions. Our studies explore various media and genres to gauge the impact of our evolutionary inheritance, in interdependence with the respective cultural environments, on our aesthetic appreciation. As they suggest, research into mass culture is not only indispensable for evolutionary criticism but may also contribute to our understanding of prehistoric selection pressures that still influence modern preferences in popular narrative.
Contributions by David Andrews, James Carney, Mathias Clasen, Brett Cooke, Tamás Dávid-Barrett, Tom Dolack, Kathryn Duncan, Isabel Behncke Izquierdo, Joe Keener, Alex C. Parrish, Todd K. Platts, Anna Rotkirch, Judith P. Saunders, Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, Dirk Vanderbeke, and Sophia Wege.
Contents
List of Figures
Introduction
Brett Cooke and Dirk Vanderbeke
1 Evolution and Slasher Films
Mathias Clasen and Todd K. Platts
2 Remaking, or Not, the Classics: Straw Dogs and Biocultural Stability in Rape-Revenge Movies
David Andrews
3 Imagining the End of the World: a Biocultural Analysis of Post-Apocalyptic Fiction
Mathias Clasen
4 On Love and Marriage in Popular Genres
Dirk Vanderbeke
5 Social Network Complexity in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro
Tamás Dávid-Barrett, James Carney, Anna Rotkirch, Isabel Behncke Izquierdo
6 Banal Classicism and Borrowed Ethos in the Rhetorics of Human and Nonhuman Animals
Alex C. Parrish
7 The Reader Is Always Right. Biopoetic and Cognitive-Aesthetic Aspects of Karl May's Adventure Novel Winnetou I
Sophia Wege
8 Why We Read Detective Fiction: Theory of Mind in Action
Judith P. Saunders
9 Handel, Senesino, and Giulio Cesare, or the Irreversible Decline of Opera Seria
Brett Cooke
10 We've Evolved into the Gutters: Using Cognition and a Graphic Novel to Kill Shakespeare
Joe Keener
11 Theory of Mind and Mind Eating: the Popular Appeal of Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Kathryn Duncan
12 The Relevance of Popularity: Ecological Factors at Play in Story Pervasiveness
Michelle Scalise Sugiyama
13 A Quantitative Approach to Counterintuitive Imagery in the Hebrew Bible and the Harry Potter Novels
Tom Dolack
Index
