Evolutionary Perspectives on Imaginative Culture

by Joseph Carroll, Mathias Clasen, Emelie Jonsson

Overview

This pioneering volume offers an expansive introduction to the relatively new field of evolutionary studies in imaginative culture. Contributors from psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, and the humanities probe the evolved human imagination and its artefacts. The book forcefully demonstrates that imagination is part of human nature. Contributors explore imaginative culture in seven main areas:

• Imagination: Evolution, Mechanisms and Functions
• Myth and Religion
• Aesthetic Theory
• Music
• Visual and Plastic Arts
• Video Games and Films
• Oral Narratives and Literature

Evolutionary Perspectives on Imaginative Culture widens the scope of evolutionary cultural theory to include much of what “culture” means in common usage. The contributors aim to convince scholars in both the humanities and the evolutionary human sciences that biology and imaginative culture are intimately intertwined. The contributors illuminate this broad theoretical argument with comprehensive insights into religion, ideology, personal identity, and many particular works of art, music, literature, film, and digital media.

The chapters “Imagination, the Brain’s Default Mode Network, and Imaginative Verbal Artifacts” and “The Role of Aesthetic Style in Alleviating Anxiety About the Future” are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030461898
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	08/29/2020
Edition description:	1st ed. 2020
Pages:	423
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Joseph Carroll is Curators’ Distinguished Professor in the English department at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. Since the early 1990s, he has been working to integrate evolutionary research and literary study. He has developed an evolutionary theory of literature, produced interpretive essays on literary works ranging from plays of Shakespeare to modern novels, written essays in intellectual history, and conducted empirical research on protagonists and antagonists in Victorian fiction.

Mathias Clasen is associate professor in literature and media in the English Department, Aarhus University, and associate editor of Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture. His research focuses on horror entertainment from an evolutionary perspective. His book Why Horror Seduces was published by Oxford University Press in 2017.

Emelie Jonsson is assistant professor of English literature at the University of Tromsø, Norway. Her research centers on the friction between human psychology and naturalistic cosmology. She has published evolutionary interpretive arguments on E. M. Forster, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, T. H. Huxley, and Edward Bulwer Lytton, as well as collaborated on quantitative projects concerning intellectual history, biocultural theory, and poetic archetypes reflecting mating strategies. She is an associate editor of Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture.

 

Table of Contents

Part I: The Evolution of Imagination.- The Behaviorally Modern Human Imagination.- The Evolution of Imagination through Narratives and Belief.- Part II: Meta-Narratives.- Imagining the Gods.- The Evolution of Traits and Stories: Two Rival Templates for Self-Understanding.- Descent with Imagination: The Cultural Evolution of Traditional Narratives.- The Unimaginable Place in Nature: Literary Resistance to Darwinian Evolution.- Epic Communities and Cosmic Apprenticeship: Group-Belonging and Social Learning in Popular Science Books.- Part III: Aesthetics, Music, and the Plastic Arts.- Tapping the Imagination at the Dawn of Human Culture: Art, Brain and Evolutionary Pressures.- Evolutionary Constraints on Creativity in the Visual and Plastic Arts.- The Role of Aesthetic Style in Framing Cognitive Orientation Towards the Future.- The Evolution of Music: A Paradigm of Embodied Cognition.- The Influence of Image Salience on Artistic Expression: Cross-Cultural Examples of Large Felid Predators.- Key Stimuli and Power Objects: Aesthetics and Humans’ Inborn Sensibilities.- Part IV: Film, Media, and Performance.- Film and Coevolution: Kubrick’s Movies as Modes of Religious Ritual.- Why Women Love Bromance: The Rise of Slash Fiction.- “Unbreakable, Incorruptible, Unyielding”: Doom as an Agency Simulator.- Part V: Literature.- Adaptive Flights of Fancy: An Evolutionary Perspective on Speculative Fiction.- Narrative and Verse—and Comics.- Literary Representations of Parental Investment: Emotional Quandaries and Strategic Decisions.