1529 Chapter 48 Evolutionary Literary Study Joseph Carroll Introduction Evolutionary literary study has emerged only in the past 20 years or so, and its practitioners still constitute a relatively small community on the margins of the academic literary establishment. That establishment is oriented to poststructuralist ideas and thus repudiates the ideas both of human nature and of objective scientific knowledge (Carroll, 1995; Carroll, Gottschall, Johnson, & Kruger, 2012, pp. 1–6; Culler, 2011). Evolutionary literary critics embrace the notion of “consilience,” affirm the cogency of evolutionary theory, and assimilate the findings of the evolutionary social sciences. They would agree with E. O. Wilson that the world is a unified causal order and that knowledge forms an integrated field encompassing the physical sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities (Carroll, McAdams, & Wilson, in press; Slingerland & Collard, 2012; E. O. Wilson, 1998). They affirm that human mental and cultural activity is constrained by the principles that regulate all biological activity, that life has evolved through an adaptive process by means of natural selection, and that complex functional structure in living things has been produced by adaptation. They argue that the adapted mind produces literature and that literature reflects the structure and character of the adapted mind. In the 1990s and early 2000s, much of the work done in evolutionary literary study was polemical and programmatic. Scholars attacked the cultural constructivist ideas prevailing in the academic literary establishment, rehearsed the basic logic of the adaptationist program, and made exploratory efforts to formulate principles of interpretation that could be linked to specifically evolutionary ideas (B. Boyd, 1998; Carroll, 1995, 2004a; Cooke, 2002; Cooke & Turner, 1999; Easterlin, 2000, 2001, 2004; Gottschall, 2001, 2003a, 2003b; Gottschall, Martin, Quish, & Rea, 2004; Headlam Wells, 2005; Jobling, 2001; Love, 1999a, 1999b, 2003; Scalise Sugiyama, 1996, 2001a, 2001b, 2001c; Storey, 1996; Thiessen & Umezawa, 1998). Over the past decade, polemics and programmatic rehearsals have diminished while literary theory and interpretive literary criticism have matured (Anderson & Anderson, 2005; B. Boyd, 2008, 2009; B. Boyd, Carroll, & Gottschall, 2010b; Carroll, 2011b, 2012b, 2012c, 2013a, 2013c, 2013e, 2013f;