What is it about?
A lot of evolutionary arguments about literature claim to supersede older, more philosophical and even psychoanalytic views of why literature matters. I think that the best of them help to show what's going on in a lot of those older views and to renew the insights they offer.
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Why is it important?
Evolution is obviously right; literature is obviously great: we need a way of reconciling the empirical and the aesthetic.
Perspectives
I like it pretty well, especially the parts about Dr. Johnson and about distributed cognition in my extension of Evelyn Tribble.
William Flesch
Brandeis University
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This page is a summary of: Facing Fictions: The Insights and the Limits of Evolutionary Literary Psychology, Poetics Today, December 2016, Duke University Press,
DOI: 10.1215/03335372-3638054.
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