Evolution and Popular Narrative by Dirk Vanderbeke
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.
-
Shakespeare's "Hamlet"
-
Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights"
-
Woolf's "To the Lighthouse"
-
Eliot's "Waste Land"
-
Shakespeare's "Othello"
-
Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins
-
Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead"
-
Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park"
-
Shakespeare's History Plays
-
Milton's "Paradise Lost"
-
Poetry of William Wordsworth
-
Shakespeare's "King Richard II"
-
Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet"
-
Tennyson
-
Shakespeare's "King Lear"
-
Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus"
-
Dickens' "Great Expectations"
-
Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbervilles"
-
George Eliot's "Mill on the Floss"
-
Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre"
-
Austen's "Emma" and "Persuasion"
-
Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida"
-
Poetry of W.B. Yeats
-
Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra"
-
Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale"
-
Elizabeth Bowen
-
Shakespeare's "As You Like it"
-
Hardy's "Return of the Native"
-
Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing"
-
Poetry of Alexander Pope
-
Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure"
-
The Poetry of William Blake
-
Demenageries
-
Destruction in the Performative
-
Replacement
-
Utopian Dreams against the Grain
-
The Montage Principle
-
Gender across Media Landscapes
-
Sexuality and Eroticism in a Post-pandemic World
-
Refresh the Book
"[…] this edited volume is an excellent addition to the study of popular culture, introducing a wider variety of narrative to the Darwinian approach[…] It is encouraging to see such a broad range of narrative included, especially some of those often aimed at a young audience, such as graphic novels and Harry Potter. As someone who has dabbled in this area myself and advocated for the study of popular culture as artifacts of human nature, I highly recommend Evolution and Popular Narrative to anyone interested in the application of evolution to the arts or the study of popular culture in general."
-Catherine Salmon, in Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2020, pp. 141-143
-Catherine Salmon, in Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2020, pp. 141-143
Dirk Vanderbeke is Professor of English Studies at the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena. He has published on a variety of topics, e.g. physics and literature, evolutionary criticism, James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, John Milton, and popular narratives including comics and graphic novels.
Brett Cooke is Professor of Russian at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Pushkin and the Creative Process, and Human Nature in Utopia: Zamyatin's We, (co-) editor of Sociobiology and the Arts, The Fantastic Other, Biopoetics: Evolutionary Explorations in the Art, and Critical Insights: War and Peace.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9789004391154 |
| ISBN 10 | 9004391150 |
| Title | Evolution and Popular Narrative |
| Author | Dirk Vanderbeke |
| Series | Critical Studies |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Brill |
| Year published | 2019-06-27 |
| Number of pages | 312 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |