Joseph Carroll (scholar)
Encyclopedia
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.
Evolution and Literary Theory established the field of evolutionary literary studies and critiqued poststructuralist theory for seeing the world as if it were textual and for seeing meaning as undecidable. Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature and Literature collected the essays from Carroll’s next decade. A second volume, Reading Human Nature, collected later essays. Carroll and colleagues have applied empirical methods—an Internet survey of reader responses—to an evolutionary analysis of British nineteenth century fiction. Carroll edited Charles Darwin
’s On the Origin of Species and co-edited volumes 1 and 2 of The Evolutionary Review.
Evolution and Literary Theory established the field of evolutionary literary studies and critiqued poststructuralist theory for seeing the world as if it were textual and for seeing meaning as undecidable. Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature and Literature collected the essays from Carroll’s next decade. A second volume, Reading Human Nature, collected later essays. Carroll and colleagues have applied empirical methods—an Internet survey of reader responses—to an evolutionary analysis of British nineteenth century fiction. Carroll edited Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
’s On the Origin of Species and co-edited volumes 1 and 2 of The Evolutionary Review.
Major works
- The Cultural Theory of Matthew Arnold (1982).
- Wallace Stevens’ Supreme Fiction: A New Romanticism (1987).
- Evolution and Literary Theory (1995).
- Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection (2003) - Editor.
- Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (2004).
- Evolution, Literature and Film: A Reader (2010) – co-edited with Brian BoydBrian BoydBrian Boyd is known primarily as an expert on the life and works of author Vladimir Nabokov and on literature and evolution...
and Jonathan GottschallJonathan GottschallJonathan Gottschall is an American literary scholar, the leading younger figure in literature and evolution. He teaches at Washington and Jefferson College in Pennsylvania....
. - Reading Human Nature: Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice (2011).