Combining cognitive and evolutionary research with traditional humanist methods, Nancy Easterlin here demonstrates how a biocultural perspective in theory and criticism opens up new possibilities for literary interpretation.Easterlin maintains that the goal of literary interpretation is still of central intellectual and social value. Taking an open yet judicious approach, she argues, however, that literary interpretation stands to gain dramatically from a fair-minded and creative application of cognitive and evolutionary research. This work does just that, expounding a biocultural method that charts a middle course between overly reductive approaches to literature and traditionalists who see the sciences as a threat to the humanities.Easterlin applies her biocultural method to four major subfields within literary studies: new historicism, ecocriticism, cognitive approaches, and evolutionary approaches. After a thorough review of each subfield, she reconsiders it in light of relevant research in cognitive and evolutionary psychology and provides a textual analysis of literary works from the romantic era to the present, including William Wordsworth's 'Simon Lee' and the Lucy poems, Mary Robinson's 'Old Barnard,' Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'Dejection: An Ode,' D. H. Lawrence's The Fox, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, and Raymond Carver's 'I Could See the Smallest Things.' A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation offers a fresh and reasoned approach to literary studies that at once preserves the central importance that interpretation plays in the humanities and embraces the exciting developments of the cognitive sciences.
Preface 1. Literature, Science, and Biocultural Interpretation Literature and Science? The Emergence of ""English"" and the Two Cultures What Is Consilience? The ""Unimaginable Complexity"" of Interpretation The Centrality of Interpretation: Glimpsing Knowledge Are Art and Literature Adaptations? What Is Literature For? 2. ""It Is No Tale"": Narrative, Aesthetics, and Ideology Aesthetics under the Sign of Ideology Narrative Knowing and Epistemic Constraints Cognition, Modernization, and Aesthetic Transformation Unknowing the Narrative Habit: Wordsworthian Configurations Mary Robinson's Lyrical Tale 3. Minding Ecocriticism: Human Wayfinders and Natural Places Mental Maps for Critical Footpaths Constructing Minds Constructing Environment Constructing Place Literary Constructions of Nature, Place, and Environment No Place: Wide Sargasso Sea and Psychic Displacement 4. Remembering the Body: Feelings, Concepts, Process Cognitivism in the Matrix of Experience Multiple Cognitions From Cognitive Rhetoric to Conceptual Blending Cognition, Consciousness, and the Modern Mind In the Literary Matrix: Cognitive Ecological Process Vines and Vipers: Re-regulation in Coleridge's ""Dejection"" Shrinking the Self: ""I Could See the Smallest Things"" 5. Endangered Daughters: Sex, Mating, and Power in Darwinian Feminist Perspective The Emergence of Darwinian Literary Criticism Whose Life History? Wuthering Heights and the Social Emotions Inbreeding Depression and Romantic Incest Mating Strategies, Monogamy, and Sexual Equality Quarry or Wife? The Proprietary Male and Relational Possibility in The Fox Notes Bibliography Index
""There is much to admire in Easterlin's extraordinary synthesis of biocultural literary approaches; anyone working in the field as student or researcher will get a great deal of intellectual stimulation from her text.""
