Jonathan Gottschall is an American literary scholar, the leading younger figure in literature and evolution. He teaches at Washington and Jefferson College in Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...

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The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence and the World of Homer uses Homeric epics and other sources to reconstruct Aegean

Aegean civilization

Aegean civilization is a general term for the Bronze Age civilizations of Greece around the Aegean Sea. There are three distinct but communicating and interacting geographic regions covered by this term: Crete, the Cyclades and the Greek mainland. Crete is associated with the Minoan civilization...

 life at the end of the Greek Dark Age

Greek Dark Ages

The Greek Dark Age or Ages also known as Geometric or Homeric Age are terms which have regularly been used to refer to the period of Greek history from the presumed Dorian invasion and end of the Mycenaean Palatial civilization around 1200 BC, to the first signs of the Greek city-states in the 9th...

, and shows that the violent conflicts represented in these epics describe social realities that can be understood in terms of evolutionary psychology

Evolutionary psychology

Evolutionary psychology is an approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological traits such as memory, perception, and language from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations, that is, the functional...

. Literature, Science and a New Humanities advocates that the humanities, and literary studies in particular, need to avail themselves of quantitative and objective methods of inquiry as well as the traditional qualitative and subjective, if they are to produce cumulative, progressive knowledge, and provides a number of case studies that apply quantitative methods to fairy and folk tale around the world to answer questions about human universals and differences.

Gottschall was profiled by the New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education

The Chronicle of Higher Education

The Chronicle of Higher Education is a newspaper and website that presents news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty, staff members and administrators....

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Major works

• The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (2005) – edited with David Sloan Wilson.
• The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence and the World of Homer (2008)
• Literature, Science and a New Humanities (2008)
• Evolution, Literature and Film: A Reader, (forthcoming, 2010) – co-edited with Brian Boyd
  Brian Boyd
  Brian Boyd is known primarily as an expert on the life and works of author Vladimir Nabokov and on literature and evolution...
  
   and Joseph Carroll
  Joseph Carroll (scholar)
  Joseph Carroll is a pioneering scholar in the field of literature and evolution. He is currently Curators’ Professor at the University of Missouri-St Louis, where he has taught since 1985....
  
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External links

• Staff home page at Washington and Jefferson College