Books in the Evolution, Cognition, and the Arts series

What were the consequences of Tolstoy's unusual reliance on members of his family as source material for War and Peace? Comparison of the novel and its fascinating drafts with the writer's family history reveals increasing preferential treatment of those with greater relatedness to him.

Examines selected works in the American literary tradition from an evolutionary perspective. Using an interdisciplinary framework to pose new questions about long admired, much discussed texts, the collection as a whole provides an introduction to Darwinian literary critical methodology.

Darwin famously proposed that sexual competition is the driving force of ""art"" production not only in animals, but also in humans. This book reveals that Darwin's hypothesis, rather than amounting to a full-blown antidote to the humanist tradition, is actually informed by classical rhetoric and by English and German philosophical aesthetics.